Unraveling Legitimacy: Political Narratives and Ideological Shifts with Benjamin Studebaker

Benjamin Studebaker unpacks the complexities of legitimacy and ideology in liberal democracies, revealing how these narratives shape our understanding of political engagement. The conversation emphasizes the need for constructive alternatives within political discourse and challenges listeners to confront the narratives they adopt and the implications of their political apathy. 

• Introduction to the concept of legitimacy in the context of liberal democracies 
• Exploring the relationship between legitimacy and ideology 
• Critique of the left's historical reluctance toward positive narratives 
• Discussing legitimacy stories and their role in political acceptance 
• The metaphor of the hydra representing competing political interests 
• Impact of fear on political engagement and discourse 
• The need for genuine political action in lieu of insincere rhetoric 
• Reflections on the future of legitimacy and participation in democracy

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:48 Exploring Legitimacy in Political Theory
• 10:37 Exploring Narratives of Legitimation in Politics
• 23:34 Rise of Fear-Based Legitimacy in Politics
• 34:17 Modern America's Insincere Legitimation Stories
• 43:41 Perceptions and Realities of Political Violence
• 52:54 Politics, Legitimation, and Ideological Violence
• 56:52 Theories of Legitimation in Politics
• 1:13:05 Exploring Right-Wing Divisions and Ideologies
• 1:17:27 Democratization and Social Class in America
• 1:21:06 Exploring Legitimacy and Complexity in Politics
• 1:24:54 Political Dysfunction and Disillusionment
• 1:30:54 Politics and Baby Boomer Myths
• 1:40:24 Critiques of Legitimation in Politics
• 1:50:22 Understanding Political Incoherence and Insincerity
• 1:57:05 Trump's Political Support and Military Loyalty
• 2:06:31 Corporate Culture and Political Disillusionment
• 2:12:48 Future Availability of Book Announcement

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Hello, mark and Navarro and Blog, and I'm here with one of our most popular guests, benjamin Studebaker, and I just want to say a guy I've become mightily fond of, after initially being a little bit hesitant to even talk to you. We're talking about your new book, which has one of those great names. I actually like that you didn't put it in some subtitle that your book is literally just what it is Legitimacy and Liberal Democracies. And I'm just going to also contextualize the date. We're recording this, even though this is coming out in 2025. We are recording this at the well, right after the election in 2024. Well, right after the election in 2024. So, just so you know, that's the context for this discussion a little bit, even though we didn't necessarily intend it to be, although ironically, I'm like I must have subconsciously knew putting you directly after the election was going to be prescient. So, ben, legitimacy what is that and why does it matter to liberal democracies?

Speaker 2: 1:59

Thanks a ton for having me back to talk about this book. I am very excited to discuss it. This one is precious to me. I do love it.

Speaker 2: 2:08

So, yeah, legitimacy the way I think about it, legitimacy and ideology are two faces of the same concept. They're both. The narratives might actually have legitimacy, right, and the ideological point of view is the critical point of view, the point of view which says, well, of course, this is bullshit, right. And in this book I try to put these two perspectives in conversation. So when we talk about legitimacy, we are always also talking about ideology, and vice versa in this book. But of course the language as is my tendency is going to be mainly the language of liberal realism, because that is the kind of language in the academy more people are familiar with and it's the kind of language that speaks to a larger audience. But you can translate all of it over into this language of ideology, and there are points in the book where I do this explicitly. The way I frame it.

Speaker 2: 3:16

A legitimation story is an explanation for something the state is doing or not doing, right. So it's an explanation for a state act and it usually involves some kind of abstract value, what I call legitimating abstraction. This abstraction is nebulous. It's not entirely clear what it means from the word in itself. It doesn't have one obvious consensus definition, right? So if you do something, you then go well, I'm doing it to advance this value, this abstraction, and then you have to concretize that abstraction. You have to show how the abstraction actually connects to the action, and I refer to this as the conceptualization, right? So when you conceptualize the abstraction, you apply it to the action and that gives you a complete legitimation story or, if you prefer, ideological narrative prefer ideological narrative.

Speaker 1: 4:18

So I guess one thing I have to ask is how is this concept of legitimacy both more and less explanatory than, say, the old Marxian concepts of ideological explanation?

Speaker 2: 4:29

Yeah. So I think when we talk about ideology, the tendency is to focus on negative criticism. Right, but of course, the whole reason we have to do the criticism is that there is a sense in which this is functional, in which it actually does work. Right, the purpose of these stories is to persuade people to accept the state's order. Right, the purpose of these stories is to persuade people to accept the state's order. Right, maybe the point of view of criticizing it, but also from the point of view of how it evolves or changes. Right, because often, when you subject an ideological narrative to critique, what will happen is that the state will reconceptualize the abstractions that you are criticizing. Right, so if you say, well, that's not real freedom, the kind of freedom that exists in capitalism, that's not real freedom. Real freedom is this other thing? Right, when you do that, you're not just criticizing the ideological narrative, you're also reconceptualizing freedom for the purposes of making that critique. So in doing that, you implicitly are not just critiquing, you're also generating a new language for legitimation. Right, and if you don't recognize that this is what you're doing, the only way that you can really critique ideology is to kind of do it right, the only way that you can ultimately overcome a narrative is to say well, that narrative isn't quite right, these terms should be understood in some other way. And once you do that, once you're saying these terms should be understood in some other way, and once you do that, once you're saying these terms should be understood in some other way, you are telling a different kind of legitimation story, and part of what makes your critique persuasive is that people accept this other story that you're telling. So there's a need, I think, when you're trying to displace an ideological narrative, to offer some other kind of legitimation story, and that might involve reconceptualizing the abstraction, like we just discussed, in terms of freedom, right. Or it might involve substitution. Someone might invoke God or nature, and you might go. Those aren't the abstractions that you should be invoking. You should be talking about liberty and equality instead, right? So there are these shifts that people try to pull off. They try to get people to think in terms of different abstractions, or they try to get people to reconceptualize the abstractions in different ways, and in both of these cases, they're not just doing ideology critique, though of course they are doing that, they are also telling new legitimation stories. So they are also attempting in some way positively to take power. They're offering something positive, not just negative. But often the positive aspect is not centered, or if it is centered, it is as if that's evidence that they're doing something wrong.

Speaker 2: 7:31

A lot of people, influenced by, say, foucault, will say well, you're just offering some new power and knowledge, nexus. Well, but this is politics. Politics is about political order, and whether this is the best kind of political order we can have or whether there's some other order we should have instead. Right, and so, of course, in the process of critiquing one form of political order, you would probably end up proposing some other kind of order. It might be a very different kind of order, it might look nothing like the kind of order that we've had to this point.

Speaker 2: 7:57

But unless you're engaged in a very, very kind of utopian project, you probably think that there will need to be some kind of story or narrative about why the new political or social order that you're proposing is acceptable or good or just, or delivers on freedom, or delivers on equality or fairness, or is democratic or is representative. There's some kind of abstract value that's going to come into that story at some point. Otherwise, why do you want it? Why do you want something else. There must be something that you want. Let's talk about what we want as well as what we don't want.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Why do you think that both critical theory and left theory in general has shied away away from positive views of legitimation? I mean, we, you know I'm gonna say we are going to get to more contemporary analysis here, but I do think we need to like start historicizing the left's own response to legitimation, because I actually do see it as a weakness, in particular to the left, that we have against other forms of ideology.

Speaker 2: 9:16

Yeah, I think a lot of this comes out of the legacy of the 20th century and the lessons that the left has taken from the 20th century, which is really a lack of self-confidence. The left on some level thinks that no matter how good the values of the left might be, if there's an attempt made to concretize those values, it's highly likely to produce an authoritarian state like the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China or North Korea or what have you. That would look unappetizing to many people. And because of this feeling that there's no way of articulating legitimation stories that are not going to produce something like that, there is a tendency to shy away and to only want to do critique.

Speaker 2: 10:00

But if you only do critique and you don't propose things, then when the rubber hits the road and people are making decisions about whether to support you, they have no reason ultimately to support you. People are making decisions about whether to support you. They have no reason ultimately to support you. They can say well, of course all your criticisms of capitalism and of liberal democracy sound reasonable, but what else are we supposed to do? And that is what the boomers have been saying for a long time to us. They say well, what else are we supposed to do? Have you got thing? And the answer is usually not forthcoming.

Speaker 1: 10:34

Right. There was a brief period in the 20-teens where there did seem like there was a couple of left legitimation stories on the table. There was a West Populist legitimation story, there was gay luxury, space communism as a legitimization story, and there was catastrophism slash apocalypticism as a legitimation story. Like those are the three major narratives that I would see I think maybe now, after, in the 2020 and the 2020s on my ad anti-anti-communism as a legitimation story, but that's still a negative one. And anti-imperialism as a legitimation story, but that's still a negative one. And anti-imperialism as a legitimation story, but that again, is still a negative one. So why is there such a limited palette? Because it does seem like this has been a huge problem for leftists in trying to counter what is a crisis of legitimation in all the other teams, so to speak.

Speaker 2: 11:39

Yeah, this is interesting. One of the things that you notice there is that, in some of the different accounts that you're referencing, there is some kind of hard fact that creates a different situation, and this hard fact opens the imaginarium right. So, in the case of space communism, there's some kind of technological futurist breakthrough of some sort that makes it possible, all of a sudden, for us to do different things positively. Or, in the case of the ecological climate change collapse, there's again another event, a hard event, which changes things utterly and creates new possibility. I like to group these things together into what I like to refer to as as Passatism Passatism involving the nuclear event, which changes what can happen If you're not confident in the ability of people, here and now, in our context, to think together about something else that they might like to see, but you are nonetheless, on some level, committed to change. One way of remaining committed to change, while disavowing the obligation to actually do the work, is to posit an event whether it's a positive or negative event that would radically change the entire stakes of everything, and then to wait for this event to occur rather than doing something to actually bring about a better society. And I think this comes from this lack of confidence which human beings have now in ourselves, in our ability to do things based on our own beliefs and values. We have rejected the human in favor of waiting for either technology or ecological collapse to put us in a different situation.

Speaker 2: 13:18

The movie that came out recently, the Wild Robot, I thought was a very powerful instance of this, where you have this robot that has all of these notions of what people want and then it gets lost on this wild natural island and meets all these animals and discovers that what the animals want has nothing to do with what the humans want. So it tries to learn what it is that animals actually want and then, because it studied the animals and learned what the animals want, it's able to do this, and then it makes things wonderful on the island for the animals, until the humans show up and try to reclaim the robot and put it back to human use. And, of course, the humans are evil. It's the nature, the primitive, and the future, the technological, that are in alliance against the human, and this is a film that humans watch and feel good watching, because humans despise the humans so much at this point that there's no belief that it's possible to articulate a positive vision.

Speaker 1: 14:15

Hmm, I mean one of the observations I've made about Americans in particular and by Americans I mean people in the United States, before people in other parts of the world get mad at me is that I, you know, I spent 10 years roughly 10 years of my life, a little more than that of my 44 years outside of the United States and I came back highly critical of US culture, in a kind of deep way, and a Marxist.

Speaker 1: 14:44

So you know, two things kind of like exacerbate things, although my journey towards Marx began in the States, towards Marx began in the States, but I have been fascinated by the, frankly, misanthropy expressed everywhere as a form of legitimation for one's politics and aimed specifically at people within the body politic in the United States.

Speaker 1: 15:13

So I think about, for example, the war on terror and the critics of the war on terror and, ironically, today, I would say, after the Trump election, you know, trump come back, pulled a Grover Cleveland and, despite all odds and it really is a historic event in that sense Like thinking about that train of development in terms of like, oh well, they hate our democracy, oh well, they hate our democracy.

Speaker 1: 15:50

And if you're trying to explain why this happened and I'm not going to get into the pundits' explanations, because I think almost all single causal explanations are shitty. You are also enabling the haters of democracy and I was actually fascinated by that as a legitimation story because it is structurally identical to what we saw in the early 2000s when people trying to explain why certain things going on in the Middle East would have led to 9-11, while not necessarily endorsing or making excuses for it, and while ultimately a lot of those counter-narratives did, eventually went out. At the time they were rejected, took court as endorsing the enemy. Now I don't think that's unique to human history, but what do you make of that as a form of legitimation, particularly now?

Speaker 2: 16:51

Yeah. So I think there's still, because there is a lack of belief in alternative political systems that's come out of this legacy of the 20th century and the failure of the state socialist and fascist projects. There is this belief that democracy is really all you can do. So a lot of the discussion, and so far as it goes on, is framed around reconceptualizing democracy, imagining different procedures for democracy, making arguments about what's real democracy versus what's not, or the difference between a democracy and a republic. You'll sometimes hear in the States. A lot of this argument is about what does democracy mean? Because there's a shared understanding or view that there isn't something else other than democracy that you can do. So if you want to change the system, it has to be couched in some way in that language. You have to in some way reconceptualize the abstractions that are associated with democracy freedom, equality, representation. It can't be something orthogonal to that because of this lack of imagination and lack of confidence and other possibilities, and so one of the ways in which this becomes very controversial is that it becomes necessary to police what is the boundary between what counts as internal to democracy and internal to democratic values and what is over that line and in the category of unthinkable, unimaginable, not stuff that you can do, and part of what is going on now is that electeds have become very, very astute and effective at moving things from one side to the other for their supporters for the purposes of terrifying their supporters and making them vote. So what has happened is that a lot of people are framing things that could plausibly be treated as part of the category of democracy as authoritarian, so as to produce terror and fear in the voter base and drive them to the polls, and this has been going on for a long time. The Republicans have done this with respect to the Democrats, say, calling Obama an Obamianist, the kind of Glenn Beck narrative about the Obama administration as an incipient Leninist, maoist project, which always struck people on the left as ridiculous right. But at this point, the Democrats have picked up the same playbook and are now framing things that would formerly have been considered to be not things they would have agreed with as outside the bounds of democracy. And as this is going on, I think that people now have ideas about what's going to happen in the Trump administration. They're very much divorced from reality. People think they're going to be sent to concentration camps. People think there's going to be some kind of handmaid's tale or that there's going to be racial pogroms. It's become extremely, you know, wacky the stuff that people are believing because of this use of the concept of democracy and the sphere of what counts as democracy to drive voter turnout.

Speaker 2: 19:48

And I think when we talk about authoritarianism, it's important to remember that people have very different notions of what's bad about authoritarianism. So some people, when they think about authoritarianism, they think about it as a single individual or a single part of the state with too much power. And other people, when they think about it, they think about it in terms of a total society with a set of impersonal incentives that are Kafkaesque and irrational but which nonetheless constrain what human beings can do. And these are very different images and your response to each one would be almost diametrically opposite. Right, if you think that one person is too much power, then you want a rule of law set of impersonal incentives and structures that limit that one person and prevent that one person from dominating everything. Conversely, if you have a set of impersonal incentives and structures that are handcuffing you, what you want is to strengthen particular parts of the structure, to overcome and change and modify those incentives.

Speaker 2: 20:47

I think part of what we're seeing is that the Republicans think that there is a total system that is a bureaucratic, kafkaesque administrative thing that is dominating everything in society and that requires some one person or one part of the state to disrupt, and, conversely, the Democrats do not view the administrative state as posing that kind of threat and think instead that it's Donald Trump the individual who poses that kind of threat.

Speaker 2: 21:15

And these two images of what is outside the bounds of democracy are very difficult to reconcile. But I think we should recognize that all of these people remain committed to democracy. They don't actually think that there is some other kind of state for them. With very few exceptions, you can find very small numbers of people on both the left and the right who would make explicitly anti-democratic arguments, but in both cases those perspectives are fringe. They are mainly very online. You would not find large numbers of ordinary Democratic or Republican voters in Midwestern states who would espouse those views or often even be familiar with Twitter accounts that seem to have hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of followers. They don't really have very much purchase in the country as a whole.

Speaker 1: 22:03

Well, I am going to get into the specific thinkers on legitimacy you deal with in your book, but I do want to pull this thread out a little bit because it's very pertinent right now, this tendency to use negative legitimacy. You and I can think of one other thinker who's really talked about it. It's Michael Sandel. I don't know if you, I don't remember if you cited him in your book, but he also talks about the change of the nature of the American state, changing the forms of legitimation. So you have early or kind of organicist civic republicanism as both the economic and he doesn't use the economic framework because he doesn't think in those terms. But it's actually pretty clear from his own argument that it's implicit that as the economic and administrative apparatus expands and you include more and more different kinds of groups who do not share cultural and or economic incentives, both, so you neither have a cultural nor a class cohesive base for society, that republicanism gets more difficult to justify in this organic sense. And in the 20th century he says it moves into an administrative competence model and that he thinks around the 1980s that that starts to break down. You know, around, uh, around the end of reagan, um, and he talks about that in his american democracy book, which I have back there and I add to that and it's implicit.

Speaker 1: 23:34

When he reprinted the book he added a little, a little, a little bit about fear as a motivating factor, but that, uh, around nine, 11 or even really before it, really starting in the nineties, um, these traits of fear-based legitimacy that go back on the left to well, I mean to the to the Red Scare, and go back on the right to Goldwater, although you know we can do the Hofstadter thing and talk about it as a strain in American political thought, since there's been an American Republic, but but it's becoming more and more dominant from the sixties to the nins and then seemingly it becomes the narrative.

Speaker 1: 24:18

But this seems to have really negative effects on your political subjectivity, like an inability to even understand what other people are thinking and an unwillingness, and this seems to be. I think this is exacerbated by technology and you know I'm going to sound like Jonathan Haidt but by technology and by siloing and by the algorithm. But I don't think it's actually unlike you know those guys. I don't think it's actually caused by that. I think its origins are older and deeper. What do you make about those trends and do you agree with?

Speaker 2: 25:00

sandell on this, or would you nuance it more? Yeah, so on the cover of the book we have a hydra and I'm holding up the book because I really like the cover. It was made by a design by an artist who was a friend of my dad, my dad's dad and I. I just thought it was a cool cover. But we have this Hydra right, with these many heads.

Speaker 2: 25:17

So one of the things that I think happens is that as it becomes there's more disagreement in society, you get it becomes harder and harder for the state to be for something and for that to produce adequate legitimation. Right? Because when the state is for something in particular, there's only so many different stories that it can tell at once about that thing, right? And people who don't want that thing, who aren't convinced by those stories, will see the state as ideological and as opposed to them, especially as the state becomes stronger, as it does over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. If you don't like something the state's doing, this will seem very authoritarian to you, no matter how it comes about, no matter what democratic procedures are used to bring it about. It will strike you as very, very much in your grill, because the state is such an important part of life now. So, as this happens and you get more disagreement, it becomes harder and harder to bring people together with a hope narrative, with a positive policy proposal. So instead, the fear of what the other side will do becomes much more effective, and what that does is it allows you to tell all sorts of stories about how the other side is, in all sorts of different ways, vitiating key democratic values. The other side's attacking your freedom, it's attacking equality, it's attacking the concept of representation itself. Right, it becomes very easy to do that and to frame the other side as posing this threat. And, conversely, the other side can do the same thing with you, right, and tell huge numbers of stories about the threat that you're posing. Now, this gives you a ton of stories, and the stories all imply that you ought to get involved in democratic politics, even if the state does nothing additional for you, purely on the basis of stopping what the other side wants to do. You, purely on the basis of stopping what the other side wants to do.

Speaker 2: 27:16

And so this state generates huge numbers of narratives, and the more conflicts that it generates, the more narratives it can kick up, and this makes it harder and harder to confront the state as a unitary whole. Increasingly, people are fighting with some of the heads against other heads and at no point is the whole structure being confronted. And I think that this, over time, produces a state which is less capable of taking positive action because it is much less able to generate a consensus around a particular course of action. So when action is required, it's very difficult for the state to do it and to legitimate having done it. And oftentimes, when the state does take action, this produces a period where particular politicians have to become the bearers of responsibility for the action and then flushed. And that's really the way that the state manages to keep going after it acts, because the individual actions will never produce widespread consensus. The particular politicians and parties who are associated with the action become the bearers of it, and when you flush them in the election, it produces this sense that you have cleansed in some way the state of the impure action that it took.

Speaker 2: 28:29

So as this goes on, what I really think is happening is that before World War II, when you had a huge amount of this kind of disagreement, people would resolve it with violence. People would have a fight, they would have a war, they would have a coup, they would have some kind of struggle with weapons. They would have some kind of struggle with weapons and that would put an end to the disagreement and it would qualify it and shrink the space for disagreement. That's become much harder to do because people don't believe that anything positive will be achieved post the world wars with violence. They don't think there's another regime that will work better and they don't think that a violent struggle will issue in anything good.

Speaker 2: 29:13

And as time has gone on, our willingness to do political violence, our belief that it's a reasonable thing to do, has diminished heavily to the point where now, if someone takes up a gun and does something in politics, we regard that as a mentally ill gesture, as an inherently mentally ill gesture.

Speaker 2: 29:28

Even if somebody writes a manifesto where they explain in great detail why political violence is implied by their ideology, we will nonetheless psychoanalyze them and treat them as a crazy person. Ted Kaczynski would be an easy example of this. He has a manifesto which is very clear and explains why he did what he did, but nonetheless we don't take that seriously. We assume he must be nuts, because we can't take political violence seriously as something a reasonable person could do. This means that there is no way of qualifying the disagreement and it just intensifies, intensifies, intensifies, and so the only stuff that can happen that in any way puts brakes on this is interventions into the culture industry, interventions into algorithms online or things like. In the past, the Red Scare, closing up of the discussion, which is done by menacing particular people in society with social sanction.

Speaker 1: 30:30

I want you know, while I agree that this is an interesting problem, I actually do think it is interesting how the complexity of these debates also seems to imply that the political violence probably really wouldn't work because there's too many factions to fight. Um, you know like I think about this when, when we deal with, uh, um, different right-wing ideologies, uh, in the seventies it was left-wing ideologies too. Interestingly, and I'm not quite sure why this is, uh, despite the fact that there's more actual violence implied in left-wing political rhetoric, um, I mean, revolutionary models are explicitly violent. There is seemingly, at least after the 1970s, but even during the 1970s, like the violence was explicitly usually non-lethal. You know, we think about all these bombings that leftist groups did in the 70s, but they killed like four people and most of them were themselves. Uh, it's more than that, but it's not like I'm exaggerating, but not by a lot. I mean they really didn't like we remember them historically if they had been more. Uh, if they claim more victims, and and most of the victims I think about are like, well, that that yippee planted the bomb wrong and got blown up, that wasn't entirely true in Europe, but in America that was usually the way that that went.

Speaker 1: 32:03

And so I think there is a and I don't think your book implies this, but I'm just saying this I don't think that fear of political violence is entirely unreasonable, even though there does seem to be a double think about it, and that everybody uses language that implies political violence.

Speaker 1: 32:23

But as soon as there is political violence, they want to run away from it as fast as possible, not just for political consequences, I mean, I think it's a deeply ingrained like oh shit, we don't want the 1920s again, or we don't want the days of lead, or we don't want the US Civil War or whatever.

Speaker 1: 32:47

And one of the rationalities for this that I think a lot of people intuitively know, but they don't necessarily have language for, is that because civil wars tend to be actually more violent than other forms of wars, that like, historically speaking, civil wars are more violent than wars between nations and they're more violent than wars of occupation and insurgency, um, because they are generally zero, zero sum, and I think two centuries of that, uh, well, maybe five centuries of that, um, really change things because you look at like medieval civil wars, they actually do not involve total social mobilization. So political violence is extreme, uh, and like midi and most and I'm using medieval here colloquially, but in most medieval societies, uh, but it is limited to elites. For the most part are for people who are specifically caught up in specific peasant revolts or whatever. Um, the general population is not in general, targeted, even if they get killed by knights. They were getting killed by knights anyway. So that change of logic does seem to be a modern problem.

Speaker 2: 34:02

I mean, what do you make of that? Yeah, leaving aside cases where towns get sacked because the army needs food or there's a need to boost morale by sacking a town, leaving aside cases like that, yes, your characterization, I I think, would be broadly correct. Yeah, I think that. So if you think back to the early 20th century, you know, and even in the 70s, the assumption of many theorists in the 70s was that the struggle that was going on in the 60s and 70s would have a potentially revolutionary character, that society and the state would become opposed and that there would be some kind of move by society against the state. And in my book we go through a number of different theorists, some of whom are still around, like Habermas, who had this kind of view of the 70s as society versus the state, with the state either repressing society or making concessions to it. Right. This supposes a unitary character to society, to it right. This supposes a unitary character to society, which is not at all what we have. We have what I call deep pluralism, a much greater level of disagreement which produces all of the heads on the hydra, right. So I think if you go back to the 20s or 30s, there's a point at which the disagreement becomes sharp enough that violence becomes possible, because people in those situations can imagine that violence might accomplish something. There's enough disagreement that people feel it's worthwhile to have the violence, and the disagreement is not so much that people can't imagine that they could prevail. Right? If you have three different factions the communists, the fascists and the liberals and they're relatively unitary and relatively cohesive and they can make estimations of their forces and it's the 20s and state socialism has not yet been tried and you don't know what's going to happen you can imagine each of those groups thinking maybe a fight is the thing that will solve this problem and maybe we'll win, and then maybe we'll be able to do something. Right?

Speaker 2: 35:58

If you get to a point where people can't imagine fighting in this situation, what happens as you move forward is that you get more and more and more disagreements within each of those three camps, to the point where the names lose their meaningfulness and become difficult to place and it becomes controversial who's on which side or if there are still sides about which we may speak. And so, as this happens, you reach a level of disagreement where you and your tiny faction within the broader left or the broader right or the broader center if those terms still mean what we think they mean can't possibly imagine that you could prevail by force. There's way too many forces in society which sharply disagree with you about way too many things. Even the people that you're friendly with, that you get along with, that you invite on your podcast, don't agree with you about basic things that they would need to agree with you on if you guys were to cooperate together to wage some kind of armed struggle. So the level of disagreement becomes so vast that the odds that you would actually win become very low.

Speaker 2: 36:53

And then we also have this enormous explosion in terms of the level of force that the state has at its disposal and the likely nastiness of the fighting, which is not just evidenced by the world wars but which is vaguely gestured at by some of the things the United States has done since then and other parts of the world, and which also probably exceeds our ability to imagine, because we can't imagine, say, the American Civil War waged with the weapons of World War II, let alone with the weapons that the state has now, and there's all sorts of weapons that the state has now that we probably don't know anything about and probably couldn't even imagine and would be surprised to see deployed, and probably couldn't even imagine and would be surprised to see deployed. So for all of these reasons, we can't solve the problem with violence. And yet, historically, in every other society where very large amounts of disagreement have kicked off, the standard solution has been for there to be violence. So the usual mechanism for dealing with this problem is blocked. Mechanism for dealing with this problem is blocked, and this is causing us to invent enormous numbers of legitimation stories.

Speaker 2: 37:57

As we all desperately try to keep this thing going in various ways, because all of us know that we don't have an alternative to it, we are constantly inventing rationalizations for it that conflict with each other in all kinds of ways, and I think that this is why American politics is so insincere. Most people, their legitimation stories, are not sincerely held at this point. They are ways of papering over the fact that they fear civil war, violent death and conflict. Really, most people in the United States today are functionally habeasians who pretend that they have other kinds of values for the purposes of trying to convince other people to continue to support this system because they can't imagine an alternative to it, and I think this is the thing that we all have in common, underneath all of the different things, that we say that we don't mean. None of us want to die, and most of us are willing to sell out whatever it is that we actually believe in to avoid death, or even to avoid unemployment in the case of, say, cancel culture. Hmm.

Speaker 1: 39:05

I find that interesting because there's two implicit things that I've dealt with. You know, traveling the world and having seen the repercussions, are in some cases actually witnessing political violence. And that is for all the American talk of political violence. And we we do have a low, nascent level. It's a little higher than it was post-war, but it's actually probably lower than it was for the rest of American history. Not mean, and I'm not just talking about the civil war here. I mean there's all kinds of uh Shays, rebellion, um, bleeding Kansas, bleeding Kansas, uh, I'm trying to think of stuff after the civil war and there is a market.

Speaker 1: 40:02

Hey, market, oh yeah, but the clan of duh, uh uh, um, the counter, the counter revolutionary forces at the end of the things. That's so interesting about the insincerity of American politics today is I have people who lived through and remembered stuff like the Rotts riot. You know people around my dad's age who would tell me they can't remember a time when America has been more polarized than this. And I was like, do you remember when you were a kid? Because it was explicitly. In fact, it was so polarized that I do. You know.

Speaker 1: 40:52

I'm a believer in the theory that the Supreme court made all these weird concessions, uh, about civil rights and different groups, a Democrat, not democratically, because there was no way to build a democratic consensus around them, and that it it stalled what would have been a direct confrontation in society between different forces. But there were so many like it's not. It wasn't just like the progressive North versus the Jim Crow South. There were so many different contradictions that were coming up. You know, one of the things I always think about is people. When people talk about Jan 6, they always forget about the Puerto Rican insurrection that did the same thing. I believe it was in the 70s or in the late 60s, and there's an amnesia around violence in America, uh, where we are a more violent society in some ways than, say, europe is, although, uh, I'm always wondering when that stuff in Europe is going to break, um. But there's also the technological dimension, and people will point out that I use nukes, and I actually nukes is actually more of a, a kind of symbolic reference for all the weapons. What I'm actually thinking of is like what is your, what is your, uh, your ar-15 gonna do against a, a cluster bombing drone or um, are you know, if you know, when people see police surplus, they're terrified, right, like, right, like, like, uh, what they bought from the military, and so you see these police with tanks and I'm like, if you saw actual military gear employed here, you know you would, you would be terrified and and you're also not dealing with like the kinds of irregular violence that you might see in a place like, um, you know, uh, let's say, syria, where you know um are, uh, we could think about former yugoslavia and the balkan wars, where people are like making bombs out of, out of used uh, um, bathtubs and dropping them from from small airplanes. I mean like these kinds of.

Speaker 1: 43:08

On one hand, you see this evocation of violence all the time and, on the other hand, there is no familiarity with that level of violence in American society, even if we are a more violent society than our European counterparts, and I think that is I am torn about that because I agree with you it leads to this stalemate where people literally have no idea what to do, and it gets sublimated in both insincere and often violent rhetoric that you know that people really don't mean.

Speaker 1: 43:39

You know, because I always have this thing. I was like okay, if you really believe in political violence, are you willing to shoot your comrade in the head to save your, your and their own family if they get caught? And this is not even I'm like. You know this is a classic question that everybody was confronted in war two. If they had thought about it for 35 seconds and like you I can't even think people like beginning to fathom what that means now. So you know, I think that's an interesting problem. Where do you think this impulse towards violence goes? Does it just get sublimated in insincere rhetoric or what's going on there?

Speaker 2: 44:21

Yeah, and to kind of further some of what you were saying. You know people are sticking Ukrainian and Russian flags in their profiles. If they had any concept of what was actually occurring in Ukraine right now, they would be rooting for that conflict to end as quickly as possible. If they had any notion of what was actually occurring, in that case what you have is relatively bog, standard World War I style heavy artillery infantry running from ditch to ditch trying to take buildings in towns Horrible, horrible stuff. People don't have any concepts. They treat it like a football game, like they're rooting for a team or something.

Speaker 2: 44:59

The news coverage about it treats it like a sporting event. It's awful, awful stuff and people don't understand that. That's why they treat it in such a cavalier way. It's awful, awful stuff and people don't understand that. That's why they treat it in such a cavalier way. It's not that they really are so heartless as to have that kind of attitude to that kind of violence. It's that that violence isn't real to them. They don't have a concept of it.

Speaker 2: 45:19

And another thing on that point one way to get a sense of what this would involve is to make a friend who works in defense and ask them a question they can answer, like, for instance, is the United States military more powerful or less powerful than we generally believe? A question I love to ask people in defense, because they always say more. They always say it right away and they always look nervous when they say it, because there is incredible stuff that we just don't even know about, that hasn't seen the light of day, that we can't fathom. Uh, so, yes, uh, on that point, I think people have no idea what would be unleashed if there was actual fighting, but there is some general general sense. I think that people do have that it would be incredibly terrible, even if they're not able to cash it out and get specific about it. And I think that, yes, I think that mostly it's insincerity.

Speaker 2: 46:16

I think in the case of the United States, we have an extremely ironic, post-ironic, insincere political culture, because no one can figure out what to do, but people feel on some level that they have a responsibility as a citizen to care, to be involved or to try, and this produces a total lockup. And there's a lot of us who are in some way, shape or form, political professionals, who are paid to track this stuff and follow it, so we're paid in some way to care about it, and yet we're not able to come up with something obvious that we should do, that we feel great about. So you have to find some way to continue to feed the beast, and it results in a lot of insincere posturing. I think in other political systems, particularly the UK, which I also talk about a lot in this book, there are other ways of dealing with it that are not available to us in the United States. So in the case of the UK, because they have a Westminster system, they can just change their democratic procedures a little bit to create a perception that maybe by changing the procedures these disagreements will be resolved in some other way. And it takes a while for people to realize, after you've changed the procedures, that the change to the procedures doesn't actually unlock any greater possibility. And in that window of time you have relatively ordinary politics. So in the case of the UK, an event like Brexit will not be processed as a futile gesture for something like 10 years, 20 years, maybe longer. It will take a while for the British public to go oh wait, doing that really didn't increase what we could do. Right now.

Speaker 2: 47:53

There's a perception among many people in Britain that the leaders have failed to live up to the promise of Brexit as an event and that if you just get the right leaders in, then all of a sudden this latent potential that the procedural reform has unlocked will be realized. And as long as a sizable number of people in the UK believe that they'll engage in a very kind of banal struggle for power within the Conservative Party or within the Reform Party or for an electoral majority in the UK and that will be relatively normal politics, with people being sincere and saying what they really think, and that will be relatively normal politics with people being sincere and saying what they really think. And in response to that, there are other things they can do procedurally in the UK to kick things along. They can devolve power to the Scottish Parliament, like they did in 1997. They can do a second chamber reform. They can swap out the House of Lords for something else. They can change the electoral system around a little bit if they'd like. They have a ton of options available to them. They can go back into the European Union. They can create participatory, deliberative structures. They have tons and tons of options because their political system is extremely unitary. And because it's extremely unitary, their parliament can just vote different kinds of experimental procedural reforms.

Speaker 2: 49:06

The danger, though, is that many of those reforms will reduce that unitary character of the British state and make it harder for the British state to take other kinds of decisions going forward and to make other kinds of procedural changes. I think the most effective reform in terms of just buying time for the existing system that I've heard discussed was a proposal by my old supervisor at Cambridge, david Runciman, to lower the voting age to six to make young people think that they have an opportunity to change things, because it would take them a good 20 years to figure out that they don't. At least Each one of these things buys you a couple of decades in that system. The procedural reforms don't happen in the United States because our constitution makes them extraordinarily difficult to do. There are things you can do around the margins in terms of, you know, I think, facebook and Twitter and social media.

Speaker 2: 49:56

I think that convinced the millennial generation that we had an opportunity to do something through the procedures based on our understanding of Web 2.0, that other people in the past, you know they didn't have access to Web 2.0 and therefore wouldn't be able to realize the potential of it in democratic politics. It's evident to us now that that was stupid, but we wasted about 20 years trying to do that, and that's all that you need in this system is a good 20 years of people doing something stupid. That won't work, and you can keep going for a long time with a very high level of disagreements, as long as you can keep finding these mechanisms for making people think that they're in a new situation that has new potential.

Speaker 1: 50:39

And what I like about your book is it makes it clear that this is not really planned. No one sat down in the Pentagon or in the White House and said let's use social media for this, to distract these people. There are counter evidences, like when this clearly sort of seemingly got out of control in 2015, 2016,. You saw pressure from the government, which you know. There's been a longstanding debate between me and Doug Lane about the nature of free speech in American society, of which I said the government has always used what is technically unconstitutional and illegal means to collude with corporations to suppress speech, going all the way back to the Hays Code, but really way further than that, and that free speech is something that we've enjoyed, mainly in its limitations. So you have it, but like only kind of, and that was very clear to me in the way in 2020 that we saw this crackdown on political speech, I mean through these large media conglomerates who are doing it because they're afraid not so much of the political speech, although you know there's some very bad PR stuff about stuff going on in Myanmar and stuff like that which always surprised me that people were surprised by. I mean to be quite honest, because when I was like, if you think all the color revolutions happened because of this and if you think the Air Spring and Occupy happened because of interconnectivity on the internet internet then why do you think it would be limited to that? Like I mean, luckily it's actually not that effective, but, um, in some marginal cases, a margin, it kind of maybe had some effect. Uh, and so we see just political speech in general cracked down on, but that really has led to this ability to perceive the world just entirely incorrectly, um, without uh.

Speaker 1: 52:55

One thing that I think is interesting about this legitimation story that is part of your book, but you know I want to bring it in here is, um, we talk about ideological violence. There's a counterpoint to that, which is like communities had more in-person interaction in a deeper way, for good and ill. I don't want to romanticize this as some uh communitarians do um, uh, in prior to the uh to world war ii, like there was more, there was more consensus, agreement, because people actually had to, like, focus with people in small communities and make shit work and you just had to figure out how to do that and like that means a certain amount, even if you were the heretical weirdo down the street there's still a certain amount of consensus you're going to be maintained because you got to work with these people and you have to just survive, and that isn't true anymore. Um, in a very real way. And so that also means that this insincere kind of almost fantasy simulacra politics can like balloon, like crazy um and I don't want to sound like I was always better, like like I was always better than that I got sucked into it just like everybody else in my in my late 20s, early 30s like, um, you know, I, I could definitely see that it could go right wing, I that that was clear to me, but the idea that it was still like, oh, we can connect people, we can move. This is like the kind of connections we have in person, but we're no longer inhibited in the same ways. Um, that was fundamentally wrong and I think you're right that it bought things time.

Speaker 1: 54:35

Um, I think another thing that the legitimation crisis does is that we tend to not, we tend to see the psychological errors in people who are different from us in these legimination crises, but we don't see our own and how much they are similar to them.

Speaker 1: 54:55

If you were to tell most Democrats that their obsession with the Mueller report and Blue Anon is only more sophisticated but serves the same function as QAnon does. I said Blue Anon, but there's such of the Mueller report are are the Steele dossier, are Rachel Maddow's constant on cable television, implying that like Russian bots put Kemp in office in Georgia and stuff like that. That that narrative is more sophisticated but is basically the same kind of narrative you're seeing on the far right, or not even a far right on the right in general, and that when someone like green greenwald points out that democrats also on margin did a lot of this in the aughts and people go not on, I'm like no, I do remember greg palace running diebolt uh election machine conspiracy after diebolt election machine mysteriously in the guardian for nearly eight years and while it was not dominant the way it became on the right, it was actually tested on liberal and left audiences during the Bush administration first and it went to extremes.

Speaker 1: 56:24

You know, naomi Wolf may be a Trump supporter now and is a weirdo but she was a weirdo back then too, and I remember a book that she published that everyone else has forgotten, where she claimed the book that Bush was going to coup so Obama could never sit in 2007. And that book was not a bomb Like. People read it and took it seriously and they immediately forgot and pretend it never happened. Took it seriously, uh, and they immediately forgot and pretend it never happened. Um, so I bring this up because I I think there's a tendency of good left-wingers to not just liberals to miss how their structural blindness is similar to the people they dislike and that they also do not have a coalition to build things on. And I do. I'm going to say this as a critique of Marx and Ingalls, and you know I'm a Marxist and I often critique Marx and Ingalls. But there was this optimism and their revolutionary promises, particularly if you read like socialism, utopian and scientific, where they're like look, we're going to need political violence, but it's against a very small sector of society, it's just against the bourgeoisie. There's not really that many of them and we won't even have to kill them all. It'll be very quick and done and it's fine. And in retrospect, that was incredibly optimistic and, honestly, some of their other writings, like their writings on the uh, the the civil wars in France should have indicated that they wouldn't go that way. But that was a promise that socialists made, that yes, there's violence, but if we time this right and that was another key element if we time this right, the violence will be minimal. If we time it wrong and this was Kotze's critique of the Bolsheviks yes, we'll have to use more terror, and that is terrible and it will exhaust society. We probably shouldn't do that, but then the moment comes. Well, when's the timing ever going to be right, like it seems, like it never came, and the violence just increased, increased, increased, I mean. So you know I'm looking at this from a socialist perspective, which I will give you a second to comment on.

Speaker 1: 58:29

But this brings me to the other people you were talking about. I want to talk about these five liberal thinkers, or liberalish thinkers that you think really have a narrative of legitimation, because I think two of them are fairly familiar to leftist Habermas, and what's the other one that I would say is pretty familiar to left wingers? Oh, rawls, who I don't love, but nonetheless. But there's two that you cite that I have read a lot of and think are brilliant Dahl, and Also my mind blanks, uh doll. And bernard williams. Bernard williams, yes, thank you. And then there's the k guy who I've never heard of, um right heart casalek yeah, casalek.

Speaker 1: 59:20

I've never read casalek and I'm going to have to now. So can you go through their theories of legitimation and why they became so ensconced in our understanding, even though most people haven't heard of but two of these figures?

Speaker 2: 59:38

Yeah, dahl is really early to the party. A lot of what people think of as having originated in Habermas goes all the way back to Dahl. Dahl was writing during the early Cold War and Dahl makes the argument that to convince people that democracy is legitimate, you have to convince them that it's the best form of government, and that will necessarily involve convincing them that it makes good decisions and that its procedures are fair both of these things. Now in political science, downstream from Dahl, these two positions have become oppositional and you have some people who argue that what makes democracy legitimate is the fairness of the procedures and other people who argue that it's the quality the epistemic quality of the decisions. These people fight each other. But what I love about Dahl is he understands that of course both of these things are relevant. You can't just pick one or the other. Democracy has to be legitimated in terms of both, and he makes the case that if people go through a period where they're confronted with epistemic failure or they're confronted with procedural unfairness, if they are confronted with injustice, then for him this will cause them to become revolutionary figures like Lenin or Gandhi, and he uses Lenin and Gandhi as the examples people who break the law and organize in society to overcome the state. So what I like about this theory is I think it really encapsulates the way 20th century Cold War theorists thought about legitimacy. Right, they're very ecumenical in terms of how you legitimate procedurally, epistemically doesn't matter. You've got to convince people that democracy is better, right and better than what. Better than state socialism, better than fascism? Right, so it's a competition and it's. Is this better or are the alternatives better? And what I love about the way Dahl sets it up is you can see very clearly how, if you change certain elements in this schema, the whole thing unravels. Right. Well, what if there are no alternatives? Well then, legitimacy can't be about saying democracy is better than fascism or communism because those are discredited. You don't have alternatives. Right.

Speaker 2: 1:01:50

At that point, when people are confronted with injustices, it's not obvious that there is some other regime that they can compare democracy to and go. Well, this other regime would take care of these things or do these things better. Nonetheless, they've still been confronted with the injustices. It's not as if this means that they are not capable of perceiving the system as having made bad decisions or as taking decisions in an unfair way. They're able to understand that, but that doesn't give them something to struggle for, and so it's not obvious to them that being like Lenin or Gandhi is a reasonable thing to do in response. Right, but it matters still that they have lost their belief in the quality of the institutions. It's just that there's nothing obvious for them to do with those feelings, right? So that's what I really like about Dahl.

Speaker 2: 1:02:38

I think Dahl is very underrated as a theorist and I think he's sharper than a lot of people who come after him that have become. Personally, I would take Dahl as a thinker over Rawls and I would take him over Habermas. I think he's a better liberal thinker than either of those two, in part because the theorists of the 40s and 50s, the liberal theorists of that time, were very much focused on the need to defend their political system from these alternatives, which makes them very practical and very reasonable in a way that later theorists operating at other points when the stakes were less clear, just aren't. You know, habermas and Rawls are really writing with the 70s in mind and they apply, you know, thinking about stability, you know, to this context in the 70s, which is really quite estranged from the context that was motivating Dahl, which really is the 30s and 40s. These are the things that, for him, were the formative experiences. So you get a very different kind of theory in Dahl that I just think more people should notice when it comes to Bernard Williams.

Speaker 2: 1:03:45

Bernard Williams comes at the end of this group of liberals and so Bernard Williams argues that you aren't going to be able to produce a consensus on the meaning of a concept like equality, so you have to have, for him, some kind of consensus on something else, and that something else for him is liberty, which he understands as the thing you need to live alongside people who have different views about equality from you. So what I like about Williams is that there's this pluralism in Williams, there's this awareness that a level of disagreement obtains now that you can't simply get rid of or overcome through consensus building, but has to be in some way politically accommodated. Where I think the limitation is is that for Williams it's still possible to have this consensus on liberty to manage the lack of consensus elsewhere. And you see the same thing with Rawls there's a positing of a consensus on the constitutional essentials and basic structure to manage the lack of a consensus elsewhere. There's a consensus on certain parts of his theory of justice but not other parts which are excluded from the basic structure. Right.

Speaker 2: 1:04:51

And this thinking where you could still have a consensus somewhere else and therefore you'll get away with the fact that you have disagreement, I think is still very 20th century. It's still thinking in terms of disagreement, inherently posing a revolutionary threat. But what if we get to a stage where it doesn't pose that kind of revolutionary threat? Koselleck is a theorist who makes it very, very clear. Right For him, revolution happens when there's a moral dualism, a gap between the values of the state and the values of society. In this latent period where this gap exists, there's a possibility to rectify the dualism and eliminate the gap. The state can act on society to bring society into alignment with it, or it can move itself to adjust to the values of society. Right. But this way of thinking, where the state is one thing that has a coherent, unitary quality and society has one thing that has a coherent, unitary quality, doesn't match at all deep pluralism, the many heads of the hydra that are popping up over the course of the second half of the 20th century and into now. So that's where I really argue that my book is new and what I'm doing is new and different and cool, which is to actually take seriously the level of disagreement and how far deep it goes and the consequences of it, all of the things that the disagreement makes impossible that theorists in the past would have thought it would imply.

Speaker 2: 1:06:14

They all think that this kind of disagreement means violence and revolution.

Speaker 2: 1:06:18

It doesn't mean that anymore, in part because the disagreement has gone far beyond the limits of what they thought of as possible.

Speaker 2: 1:06:26

They would have thought that long before we would have gotten to this level of polarization and disagreement, we would have started killing each other.

Speaker 2: 1:06:32

And it's still the case that if you talk to like boomer, never Trump Republicans this is what they think. They think that the language that's being used, the amount of disagreement that exists, just has to be too high, that there has to be violence if somebody doesn't do something immediately because there's so much disagreement. They're not able to wrap their heads around the way in which the 21st century in the United States, the UK and possibly a few other embedded democracies that have this kind of quality to them just is completely different as a context from these 20th century you know, 1930s cases, and I do think it really is the thing that we have to grapple with. We don't have a mid-20th century kind of system anymore and therefore the theories of legitimacy that worked back then and were really brilliant clever theories. Dahl is an incredible thinker who had a wonderful theory for that period that really captured something about that time and place but it just doesn't apply anymore because our situation is different.

Speaker 1: 1:07:33

I think about late Dahl too. I think about Dahl from the 70s and the 90s, which I worked through Dahl's output backwards. I started like how democratic is the American Constitution? I went back to like his polyarchy book, which actually hints at some of the stuff that you're talking about in many ways, and then his that's the one I cite.

Speaker 2: 1:07:53

The polyarchy book is the one that is the most critical for my purposes.

Speaker 1: 1:07:58

And then the, the democracy and its critics, which is, you know, also pretty seminal. Um, and I've always liked Bernard Williams, cause he struck me as a more realistic version of Isaiah Berlin. You know, like Isaiah Berlin, but for realists this time, you know, and not going to John Gray Great, took Isaiah Berlin's work, but which is just, you know, cosmic pessimism, although I'm pretty close to there, I'm not gonna lie. Um, I I do think it's interesting. I think it's interesting how hard it is to get leftist to read anyone but rawls and habermas, who, I think, like you, are actually the two weakest in this five. You know, habermas being so weak is actually interesting to me because he's a product of a school of thought that was all about critique and I guess he found it dissatisfying.

Speaker 1: 1:08:58

But what he offers is like I don't know, I mean like discursive society between the state and society that pretends that these are unitary things, which, you know, the state is not unitary. Even in unitary governments it's not actually unitary. That's why there is a deep state, virginia, and society being unitary today seems like I mean like in in so much that it was ever unitary, which is questionable, uh, seems like such an absurd proposition that I don't know why people take it seriously. Um, like, if you travel around the country and get off the internet and spend time in different parts of the nation, you realize that our society in the United States is hardly unified. And then you can even go to a smaller country like the UK and I'm not saying this cause I've done it, cause I haven't, but, um, I know plenty of people have who will tell you the same thing about a country that has a much more coherent governmental system, a much longer cultural tradition and, um, is, I don't know, tiny compared to the United States, which is a continental order, and yet, like Dorset to Manchester, is not really one coherent civil society, much less all of the UK, particularly when you start including Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland into it. And so it seems crazy to me that we think we can produce like a unitary subject and I think you even see this in left-wing thought like there's increasing focus on left-wing thought.

Speaker 1: 1:10:44

During the nineties they were like, oh, it's too late for a program, we can't agree on a program. Left-wing thought. Like there's increasing focus on left-wing thought. During the 90s move, they were like, oh, it's too late for a program, we can't agree on a program, we just have to do critique for forever, I guess. Um, that's the 70s and 90s period. Now we're back to programmatic unity.

Speaker 1: 1:10:58

But programmatic unity is because we realize that there cannot be any ideological unity, like we've seen the attempts to build ideological unity, and what they actually build is like counter-cultural, sub-cultural cults.

Speaker 1: 1:11:13

They don't actually build political movements and we we see it over and over and over again and while we know, we have our Marxist explanations as to why that happens.

Speaker 1: 1:11:23

I think your book actually clarifies, you know, and in ways that some of the Marxist stuff doesn't, why we're so given to that and why it would happen so often.

Speaker 1: 1:11:32

Because there's a limit to the amount of people we can get to agree on that level of organic society in an organic way or even in a superficial way, like in the moment you try to to enact anything with that level of organic unity, it almost inherently splits and people will say, oh, it's Trotskyism, and I'm like, no, it's not. I mean, like I can't think of an ideological left-wing tendency in the United States. It does not have this actually in in the Western world that doesn't have this character maoism, marxist, leninism, anarchism, social democracy, uh uh, primitivism, even like, like the visions, for what that is almost inherently splits incredibly quickly and unfortunately for us, I find that the only people who talk about that in any minute a really meaningful sense are often like the kind of people you're talking about and then like late 20th century reactionaries who are still alive, like Thomas, souls, like, and everybody is more interested in intra elite conflict because the right thinks that's where all the action is.

Speaker 2: 1:12:48

The right is dismissive of the workers and thinks everything is intra elite conflict. So it's all the right ever talks about, but then we don't talk about it at all. Right, so that's been the gap.

Speaker 1: 1:13:00

The right yeah. The right the right yeah is. And I always say this when people like oh, conservatives are stupid and I'm like dude. But rightists don't think that the rank and file conservatives matter. They can throw Ben Shapiro out to them all day. That's not what they believe. That is for public consumption. What they believe is closer to what Peter Turchin is talking about or what Michael Lind is talking about, or what John Me, what michael lind is talking about are what um john meersheimer on international policy is talking about, or whatever they like. They see the working class actually, they see most of the population as an inert mass to be manipulated, and they're not. If you actually read the, the, you know the, the different schools of right-wing thought, which are very different from each other. I think people miss that too. Like this polyarchy thing or this, like these debates. I think they're actually sometimes more extreme on the right than they even are on the left. They have less values overlap overlap.

Speaker 2: 1:14:08

Yeah, I was at a conference in Germany where I heard Patrick Deneen give a talk about the Straussians, who are a problem for him because they hate his project and he views them almost as this quasi-conspiratorial thing that exists in the universities that anytime anybody tries to do something that he regards as a more open-ended kind of right-wing project, the Straussians kill it. It was fascinating to hear him talk about that and how he regards them as really posing a quite sharp threat to his entire project. What he wants to do and for him that's entirely intra-right, intra-elite. It doesn't have anything to do with the left or the workers.

Speaker 1: 1:14:44

I mean even marginal groups like libertarians. I remember like the fight between, like, the paleo libertarians and the vom mises institute, the standard cato libertarians and the left libertarians, which is a confusing term because it's used by two groups that don't actually share the same ideology at all uh, chomskyites and roderick long. Uh, if you don't know who, roderick long is, a marginal's, a marginal figure who used to be aligned to the Mises Institute and was a Rothbardian but also believes things like racism is bad. So, like there is this intro libertarian civil war, which was actually solved basically by a lot of people defecting to different camps. It wasn't solved within the libertarian ideology at all, it still wasn't. I think we saw it at the Libertarian Party caucus, I mean the Libertarian Party convention this year with, like a former friend of mine, michael Rettenwald, leading the Varmusius caucus, trump trying to lead some kind of Republican conciliatory camp, and then the standard old gary johnson guys, uh, winning again out of the conflict between the two. Um, so this is universal.

Speaker 1: 1:15:55

The left is so used to talking to the left that they don't know that, they don't have any conception of that. And even when the left tries to present this, like with their leftist or soft leftist like Sam Adler bell and Michael Stillman. We'll try to like, not Michael Matthew, matthew, matthew Stillman over there at know your enemy, um uh, we'll try to our. I think about all these authors who are writing on and Rand and the 2010s, and I'm like you're already too late. The fact that you're writing about it actually indicates it's already over. But you have like the left wing, right wing whispers, but they often do not portray the divisions amongst the right accurately and I think it's partly because they don't want to admit that this is a general social phenomenon, not just a problem of left-wing ideology or activity or practice or whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:16:53

What do you make of that? I think a lot of them also. Just, they're not able because they don't have enough time, because they work other kinds of jobs. They're not able to spend enough time reading around that stuff and also their jobs tire them out, stress them out. When they have time to read, they want to read stuff that they might enjoy, whereas you and I have had in our lives an opportunity to read more widely, I think, than most people, and that's partially why we have these weird views that are so strange. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:17:27

And I also. I don't think it's a small thing that you live in Indiana and I come from Georgia and live in Utah. Well, it's just like I deal with people who do not show my worldview every day Like it is requirement of me, and I also, because of jobs that I've done, I've had to move in a lot of different social classes and most people don't. I mean that's another thing about the United States. It's a very like when you tell white, white, middle and upper middle class people that they are middle and upper middle class, they tend to be like what? Like um are the number of you know I know the fail, son tropes is a cliche. But it's a cliche for a reason where you tell like these people, like you know, the fact that you have time to go back and live with your parents, even though you didn't have an income until you were 35, um actually indicates something about social wealth that has a class habitus thing to it that you should probably take more seriously than you are um. That is lost on people too, because they they, and it's not it's not because they don't experience real deprivation, some of them do, but they have social and um familial resources that other people don't have, and thus they also have leisure that other people don't have or the ability to weather certain kinds of crises, of long-term unemployment.

Speaker 1: 1:18:49

Like you know, in my case, since I come from a blue collar background, if I'd have been unemployed for more than six months at any time in my life I would have been homeless. So you know, you do whatever you have to do and those attitudes are very different. But I've also had a lot of time to read and explore the world Most people don't get. It's been luck and a privilege and you and I are both weirdos who enjoy that. Like I do not mind sitting and reading a hundred page, 200 page, 500 page book by Paul Godfrey not someone who you know, I think is probably deployable, but but to try to understand his worldview. I don't expect other people to do that Like that's not something that would be enjoyable and I'm not even sure that for everybody it's even helpful. But if none of us do it, none of us understand what these people think.

Speaker 2: 1:19:41

Yeah, and right now in the academy there's been an explosion of kind of anthropological work where academics are studying the right, studying right populists. You know, in the academy there's been an explosion of kind of anthropological work where academics are studying the right, studying right populists. You know, in the way that in the past people used to study the you know, the populations of the colonial societies to try to understand how to govern them, that's now going on in the academy for trying to manage the right and it's right now a very lucrative way to have an academic career in the social sciences to manage the right. And it's right now a very lucrative way to have an academic career in the social sciences to study the right and to study ordinary people who have right-wing positions and figure out how to manage them.

Speaker 1: 1:20:18

Yeah, although it's funny what that also implies, because one of the things that I find interesting about your legitimacy and liberal democracy that I want to bring up before we get to the three critics that you talk about, is de-democratization is pretty thorough in most of the Western world. You know, you mentioned it in the UK, but like it, we can talk about it as a trend. Almost as soon as the liberal democratic consensus was established after World War II, we started seeing it slowly being disestablished from like day one. So what do you make of that too? Like part of I mean part of the problem, I think is the legitimacy of liberal democracies is Hydra. But part of the problem is because of the Hydra we're not actually all that democratic, because we couldn't be in function.

Speaker 2: 1:21:02

Yeah, this is certainly a point that can be made. In this particular book, I try to stay away from taking a particular stance as to which legitimation stories are the ones we actually ought to affirm, because in this particular book I think that would be a problem. It would make it hard for the book to explore certain things if I did that.

Speaker 2: 1:21:23

So I don't start from the premise that there is a correct way of understanding democracy or representation, or liberty or equality. Rather, I talk about the different views that have existed in the way in which the struggle unfolds among them. But certainly the book is very ecumenical. It's very open to being read from many different points of view, so there may be many different stories that you might have At the end of the book. I talk about four different moods people can be in and ideally I'd like the book to be readable regardless of which mood you're in, although if you're in the enclavist mood, you probably aren't in the mood to read this kind of book. A liberal, someone in the negative mood or an enclavist.

Speaker 1: 1:22:06

It's not hostile as a book to any of the particular legitimation stories ideological narratives, a reader might come into the book with, yeah, and I guess one of the things we have to say is, if we talk about de-democratization, we have to agree on what democracy is. So okay, and that's very difficult, very, very really is like I was recently reading clr james and he has this real excited thing about, uh, ethnean democracy, but then, like I'm like he doesn't even like deal with the, the whole critique of it being like, yeah, I think democracy was direct democracy of a very small elite within society, actually Like, which is true and it's not dealt with, and I think it's an interesting contradiction.

Speaker 2: 1:23:01

I also like the point yeah, the thing that distinguishes it is that it includes the rowers and not just the haplites. Right, exactly, Exactly distinguishes it is that it includes the rowers and not just the haplites right, exactly, um, um.

Speaker 1: 1:23:11

And the other thing I like to point out is like the only society that is shorter lived in the soviet union was the indian democracy, like you're dealing with a highly productive and very well documented generation and a half, like you know, as at least the Soviet Union got, I guess, three generations. So what do you make of this idea that has come up, I think, in certain circles both right and left, that these legitimacy cycles? I think about Tainter. I was reading your book and you don't mention Tainter at all, but I was thinking of Joseph Tainter and the reason why your Hydra thing actually reflects his critique of everything. His critique is a critique of almost everything.

Speaker 1: 1:24:03

Humans do that as you build surplus and as things develop and as things become systemically more complicated, ideologies become systemically more complicated, and actually that's probably a sign that things are going to crash very soon. I actually don't know where I disagree with tainters. I'm like, yeah, there might be a crash, but it seems to me we're pretty good at klugeing these societies along for like I don't know several hundred years. So while you might be ultimately right that all this is a sign of crashing, even in your examples, these societies still might not die for like such a long deray that nobody talking about politics would have a whole lot to say on it. Um, but what do you think about that? You know, know, like talk, that kind of talk in regards to these legitimation crises, that it's actually just a problem of complexity, like innate in humans.

Speaker 2: 1:24:54

Yeah, the image I like to have in this book is you imagine, like a brachiosaurus, you know big, long neck dinosaur, and it wades into a tar pit. And as it gets stuck in the tar pit, you know it's got this really long neck, so it's not immediately going to die, right? And then, if it can make itself into a hydra, if it can grow lots of different necks say, there are a bunch of trees and maybe some pools of water near the tar pit it could survive for an incredibly long time by just proliferating additional heads, right. But the more heads it has, the harder it is for it to try to struggle to get out of the tarpet. So its strategy sticks it in there very deeply and the heads get different ideas about which ways to go and what to do. They knock into each other and it starts thrashing around wildly. The heads are mad at each other and are blaming each other for the situation.

Speaker 2: 1:25:46

Right, you can imagine this huge creature. It's not in any danger of dying because it can get all the food and air and water that it needs, but it also is going to be very miserable and unhappy for a seemingly indefinite period of time, with no mechanism of resolution, and I think that this is how I would describe what's going on, especially in the United States, where there's so limited there are very limited mechanisms for generating an appearance of possibility here, compared with other democracies around the world. We're just going to get into this situation where there's an enormous amount of disagreement. This disagreement seems indefinitely irresolvable, and so what people will do is they will either they'll have to come up with some other kind of system that they actually believe might be better and would be worth struggling for, or they have to give up on the political and defect from it into something else, up on the political and defect from it into something else, and I think that there's a lot of focus on liberalism and conservatism. But the moods that are the most interesting to me are the negative mood and the enclavist mood, because I think those are really the moods that are significant when you're dealing with this kind of situation.

Speaker 2: 1:27:01

I think most people will exit the conservative and liberal moods as this goes on, and one thing I found that is interesting is that there's been a recent resurgence on the left of kind of the liberal mood, people who think that the solution to this is to reconceptualize liberty or freedom and then establish a social consensus around the meaning of a new conceptualization, or perhaps an old conceptualization that they've revived or dusted off Right. And this, I think, really doesn't grasp the fundamental problem. The issue is not that we have a bad conversation about equality or equity and we could instead have a much better conversation about freedom or liberty. It's that equality as a concept is destroyed by this process of degeneration that occurs with all abstractions you can introduce. So if you introduce freedom instead and try to emphasize that, the same process of conflict will occur around that abstraction and you won't be able to get out of the equality equity debates, no matter how stupid they become, by pivoting to a different abstraction like freedom.

Speaker 2: 1:28:06

There have been times historically where that kind of shift has been functional, but I think we don't have the necessary tools to execute a legitimation shift, and I go into some detail in the book about how do you execute these shifts. How do they actually work? What do you have to be able to do to do it? And one of the problems is what I call the abstraction access problem, which is that increasingly these liberal discussions are professional class, they're in the university system and they're to each other. They don't have social roots. So people often talk about this in relation to the party system, the hollowing out of the parties, a void in which the parties lack a social base and therefore lack the ability to structure the subjectivity of very large numbers of people Only about 25% of the US population is actually Democrats, only about 25% is actually Republicans and the actual involvement of most of those people in the party system is very limited.

Speaker 2: 1:29:04

So the actual ability of elites to structure the way ordinary people think is, I think, much more limited than is generally believed. I think most people are disaffected by politics and don't talk about it very much. But of course we don't talk about them very much because they're not talking very much. We're not seeing what they think very often, and when they do say what they think, they're not going to say it in a way that will be algorithmically tractable. It's not going to be refined in such a way that it would catch and distribute a sort of chaotic position on the left to move back into discussions about liberty or freedom.

Speaker 2: 1:29:52

It seems to me to be a running away from the real problem, which is that at this point we have some people who have a negative attitude to politics in general, a negative attitude to legitimating abstractions, have an appetite for something totally different, and on the other side we have people who are desperately trying to get away from politics and who want to form families, want to just get really into entertainment media, want to get into technology and into notions of the distant future.

Speaker 2: 1:30:18

Some of them think of what they're doing as political, but many of them overtly don't and don't want it to be political, want it to be something else, and also faith and religion is still in the mix here, and for these people all of this stuff is just really really a burden. And yet, because the state is becoming less and less able to act, all of these other zones are becoming dysfunctional as a consequence of the state's dysfunction. So there's enormous frustration even within these zones of retreat. Right, I was about to say I think about one of the state's dysfunction, so there's enormous frustration even within these zones of retreat.

Speaker 1: 1:30:48

Right, I was about to say, like I think about one of the things that makes the millennial experience different from their parents. The baby boomers is that one. The left-wing propensity of the baby boomers was always kind of a elite myth that was based on elite baby boomers. But even Rick Perlstein's documentation on this not that I love everything polishing rights but proves that that was never actually the general boomer society in the first place. Uh, that we talk about students, but students were an even way smaller proportion of society than they are today, much less. You know what they were in the 60s and that, uh.

Speaker 1: 1:31:27

And then talking about, and also he points out that like the student protests were, even though they were not people who were necessarily hyper politicized or sectarian, they were also not the majority of students, just like they aren't today. I mean, a majority of students were sympathetic to, for example, the palestinian protests, but they didn't participate or strongly care, they were just they just think it's like kind of bad and maybe somebody should do something about it, maybe, um, and that seems to be, I mean, that's even kind of a. They're even, as I pointed out to people, they're even mega people who think that. So you know, and I've seen leftists just totally shocked that like you meet some MAGA person built by the knock bottom Like, yeah, but you're believing these myths about what people know and think off of baby boomer media that you know has dominated everything for so long. But it's a false consensus now and it's been for a while.

Speaker 2: 1:32:26

Yeah, I've met a lot of Republicans who view Trump as the peace candidate.

Speaker 1: 1:32:29

Right, oh yeah, and I've had arguments with people, even some people I'm writing an article with, about whether or not he's sincere about that and I just like it doesn't kind of matter. But we actually know that Trump has done both things. I mean demagogic figures do that, and Trump is harder to predict, uh, than machine democrats like we kind of, like we actually do. I think society does have a general model what machine democrats are going to do regularize prior republican parties use, like people kind of know, even if they don't admit it.

Speaker 2: 1:33:13

We actually don't always know what Trump is going to do, which is yeah, there's a little bit of a casino logic to it, which is you know that Harris isn't going to do anything very different, but you can place a bet, even if it's a very unlikely, odd, low, odd situation. You can take a bet on something else happening, and a lot of people are in a position where they'd rather place that bet.

Speaker 1: 1:33:33

Which is weird, because he's a candidate we know, but he's still so chaotic that, even though we know him we actually, because we know him we're still like we don't really know what he's going to do. Actually, because we know him, we're still like we don't. We don't really know what he's going to do, like, um, uh, yeah, one of the things that I found fascinating about trump versus harris is harris is a suit who is a cipher and will lie to you, to your face. I think about an example where she said she considered into doing an arms embargo and then the very next day, her campaign reminded her that she couldn't even promise that um, and retracted, like that.

Speaker 1: 1:34:07

That was a thing that happened, whereas Trump is similarly inconsistent, but he isn't inconsistent in such a clearly opportunistic way that you can actually say that it's insincere. He seems inconsistent and like no, he just like changed his mind on a dime and it's like, and he could convince himself of the change. I and I don't. No, he just changed his mind on a dime and he could convince himself of the change, and I don't.

Speaker 1: 1:34:30

It's dangerous to psychologicalize any figure, but I think that's why he's not perceived as being and even by his enemies as being as being an inconsistent or like flip floppy candidate, even though, like, if you look at his policy papers in 2016 versus his policy papers in 2021, versus his own response to the project that was built off of his prior policy papers, they're wildly inconsistent and his actual even his governing coalitions what one of the things about Trump's governing coalitions when he was in office that people I think under explore is, as far as dealing with this polyarchy thing, trump's answer to it's actually somewhat similar to biden's was to put different factions in power almost as a rotating seat.

Speaker 1: 1:35:17

Unlike biting, he fired them all the time when they pissed him off, but like it was this like we have, we don't have a, we have a coalition. So like I don't know, let's throw a neoconservative in there and whatever. And while there probably will be less of that this time, I'm not totally sure because I'm still not sure that Trump has that stable of a political identity and that may be why he's a character for this moment Vivek and Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance have very different politics, and Kushner and Ivanka have very different politics from both of them.

Speaker 2: 1:35:54

It's going to be the same kind of thing and ultimately I always expect Jared and Ivanka to win, because you can't fire the family. I always expect them to ultimately prevail. Whenever things get really hot, everybody else can only do what Jared and Ivanka will tolerate, and if Jared and Ivanka decide that they want you out, you're going to be out eventually.

Speaker 1: 1:36:17

Right. And I mean, I also think, like Vance has very different politics from Vivek Swamy, but Vance is also a material figure, uh, but Vance is also a material figure, um, so, uh, I, I find this. I find this interesting because what you know, when we talk about the two views of power, the view that you have a system that's crushing you and that's now become the Republican, interestingly and surprisingly, because you know, leftists talk about systems all the goddamn time, and yet the way you actually see politics portrayed, um, from people who are left adjacent, is that it's a, it's a problem of a person and this person represents the end of democracy or whatever. And also I, I want to point out and you you've talked about this elsewhere, I've heard other people talk about it too that that talking point actually is not popular with most Democrats and almost all Democrat adjacent independents. They actually are not super responsive to the democracy thing. It only seems to work with white college educated liberals. It's the Liz Cheney crowd.

Speaker 2: 1:37:27

The never Trump Republicans are the only people who really believe it and that's why they were shocked during that window at between the debate and Harris, that Biden seemed to have no plan to win the election and so many Democrats were acting like it was no big deal If they lost. The never Trump Republicans were foaming at the mouth and going crazy because they couldn't believe that. The Democrats didn't actually believe the rhetoric about democracy. But they're the only people, I think, who really believe the Trump poses an existential threat to democracy thing because they actually did move in response to that and change their behavior and activity over that point Right, whereas, like you know, the the white educated artist, uh, will pick up that rhetoric.

Speaker 1: 1:38:11

but do they actually believe it? I mean, I it's hard for me to. It is really hard for me to deal with the fact that they're not holding their candidate accountable for just peacefully transferring power. If they actually believe that Trump is going to completely destroy democracy and become a dictator tomorrow or in January.

Speaker 2: 1:38:34

Yeah, if somebody were to try to shoot Donald Trump, my expectation, if I had to guess their ideology would be never Trump Republican Would be Mitt Romney, liz Cheney fan. That would be my guess.

Speaker 1: 1:38:48

Well, I mean, I think we can look at the weird ideologies of the people who did try to shoot Donald Trump. One of them we have no idea what their ideology really was, but it does seem to be some kind of centrist ideology that guy who shot him in the ear and the other was explicitly NATO-based about Ukraine. Neither one of them were diehard leftists or even diehard liberals from any evidence that we have and, trust me, if they had any evidence the conservative media would be spinning it. They don't.

Speaker 2: 1:39:28

It's the Republicans who really believe in the ancient concept of tyranny, principle of six emperor Tyrannus.

Speaker 1: 1:39:34

Those are the people who actually believe that stuff yeah actually kind of funny that it's like the people who who won a, an imperial uh, and who won an imperial hegemony also actually do believe in, um old concepts of republicanism. In a very strange way, like I guess this proves that the neocons actually meant what they said about democracy, even if it was dumb um they love Cicero, man, cicero, cato, those are their guys at the end of the day.

Speaker 2: 1:40:12

Their notion of the canon is that those Roman Republican thinkers are absolutely central.

Speaker 1: 1:40:19

Yeah, if people were at Stroudsmore they'd know that. I guess this leads us to the three critics that you talk about of legitimation. You talk about Althusser, which we haven't brought up, adorno and Weymann-Guis, Guis, guis, yeah, and I want to let you participate on that and maybe we can apply that to contemporary society. Let's start with Adorno. Legitimation as despair, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:40:50

So the thing I love about Adorno is that he has all of these different uses for the concept of ideology right, and this produces confusion on the part of many people who read Adorno. But the thing that I think is really worth focusing on is this idea that ideology is the thing that maintains the order that drives people to despair. Right, so if it maintains the order that drives people to despair, then it is the thing which helps to drive people to despair. It has this role in moving people toward this negative mood, and for me, that's where Adorno really fits in this book, and for me, that's where Adorno really fits in this book. He explains how these legitimation stories eventually produce despair, which he describes as the final ideology. It's the last ideology that you're in before you come up with. You know you enter into the subjectivity of being revolutionary, but then there's this question of does that really go through now? And you know what else can happen apart from that, and so that's really where I'm interested in tearing with Adorno in this book. When you get driven to despair, what comes next? Do you become a revolutionary subject? Well, only if you can imagine something worth struggling for, and if you can't, then what other possibilities are available to you.

Speaker 2: 1:42:16

I think suicidality and suicide by cop, suicide by drone, suicide by lifestyle is one of the major outcomes in recent years that comes out of this confrontation with despair. Without a political response, without a social organization, political organization you can join, that looks meaningful. These other alternatives are often very, very bad for the person in that situation and that's why there's such a strong impulse, a survival instinct in people to get out of despair through some kind of cope, through some kind of other kind of ideological narrative that will paper over the despair. Even if it's very ironic, even if it's not very sincerely held, even if it's a pragmatist strategy, it kicks away this possibility of suicidality which starts to lurk when you actually get close to revolutionary subjectivity. The possibility of killing yourself because you don't see something to do starts to be there. And that's where I think things get dangerous and it's part of the danger that is there for anyone who engages seriously in left wing thinking for any length of time. It lurks and will raise its head. If you get too thoughtful about this and you don't have a praxis, you don't have something to do, it's a danger and it goes after you.

Speaker 2: 1:43:43

I also bring into the book Althusser, in part because I think Althusser highlights that this tendency in the middle of the 20th century to think of the state as this very unitary, totalized thing and to think of society as something which is acted upon by the state is even replicated within Marxism and even replicated within critiques of ideology, where Althusser suggests that there are these repressive apparatuses but also these ideological apparatuses which constitute subjects right. This idea that the subject is constituted by the state, that the state operates at such a high level of power within society, within the culture, industry, that it's able to structure subjects and that you could only get a revolution when, in some way, shape or form, this structuring doesn't come off right, doesn't totally work. This is at play in Althusser's theory explicitly, but also implicitly in lots of other theories that don't think of themselves as Althusserian but which do involve this unitary state which is acting on society. And I see a similarity between Althusser's account and, say, koselleck's, even though Koselleck is often thought of as on the right. This idea that there's a state that's in dialogue with the society that the state acts upon is very, very much the same general kind of thinking, and I think that part of why Althusser goes to all of this trouble is that his project is very much about trying to render Marxism analytically precise. In the course of rendering it precise, he concretizes it in a way that makes it less flexible and less able to deal with different, distinct situations, different theories of legitimacy and ideology for different moments in history, different contexts and periods, which is why I can say, on the one hand, that Dahl's theory or Adorno's theory is brilliant and fascinating and very wonderful for describing a time, but doesn't necessarily port directly over into our time. And in seeing the gap between that theory, that period and our time, we're able to start to think in, I think, a more effective way about what we can do theoretically to adjust for these new circumstances. And that doesn't just mean taking their theory and straightforwardly reforming it. It may mean coming up with something that is different, but it will be informed by why it was that people conceived of legitimacy, conceived of ideology in these ways in the mid 20th century. And why is it that it strikes us today that that would not be the right way to do it?

Speaker 2: 1:46:15

Goiz, I think, is fascinating because Goiz enters the scene in the 80s with this book about critical theory, where he's just trying to defend the idea that ideology is a relevant or meaningful concept at all, that we should talk about it at all. So it's a very defensive kind of book and it involves concretizing it for the purposes of just protecting the idea that it means anything. And he's forced to do that because he's trying to write this in the academy in the 80s. A lot of Marxists do this in the 80s. They try to concretize the hell out of all of it to try to defend it intellectually.

Speaker 2: 1:46:51

But the problem is it's not an intellectual problem, it's a problem of history. It's a problem of Marxism losing historical steam. So there's no way of just describing it intellectually that will protect it from what is ultimately coming, which is the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the appearance of possibility there. And that's what I really think changes ultimately the way we talk about ideology is the loss in the 90s of the alternative and therefore the loss of the idea that liberal democracy has to compete with other regimes and therefore needs an account of why it's better. When you have that, when you have regime competition, the concept of ideology is just obvious. In the Cold War it's just obvious why you need it because you have to engage in regime competition. You have to explain why your regime is better than the other regime that exists right. When you don't have that competition, it seems like it's no longer an important concept and people start looking to defend it intellectually.

Speaker 2: 1:47:46

But in this book, I think it becomes possible to defend it historically, if only because the possibility of critique has so clearly returned in a way that it had not in the 90s or even in the 2000s before the 08 crash.

Speaker 2: 1:47:59

We now live in a time when people are very dissatisfied with liberal democracy and even with capitalism, but they're not able to articulate an alternative to it which is compelling to people at scale, and therefore it's not obvious how this loss of legitimacy, how this loss of ideology, can actually be politically taken up. And this gap is the thing which ultimately either must be filled in by some new account that is actually mobilizing in the relevant old-fashioned sense, an extremely tall order, very tall order, right or that won't happen and we will have this incredibly stuck, very ironist kind of bullshit American politics where we pretend the things that we're saying are meaningful while we do nothing, and I think that's where we are. I think 2024 perfectly encapsulated that kind of election, an election where people said all kinds of stuff they didn't mean, and what will ultimately happen is a whole lot of nothing.

Speaker 1: 1:48:56

Right, and I guess now we have the Republicans. They look I mean it's hard to say with the House. It looks like the Democrats lost this as much as Trump won it Until today with California, and Trump's gains in California are actually more significant than people thought. I mean, Harris clearly won it, but Trump has made up.

Speaker 1: 1:49:26

Yeah, oh yeah. Trump has made up his numbers. It looked like he was, he was winning with, in a similar way to the way the Tories won and not Tories Tories lost to labor and Britain, which was labor, actually lost a share of votes down from, uh, from the corbin period, but they, but the tories were so hated for a variety of reasons that, um, it was a landslide for labor. It was looking like that was happening to trump. California is, as of when I checked, was like 70% reported and it looks like actually no, trump actually did beat his 2020 numbers just slightly. Um, and Harris didn't lose 15 million votes. She lost 11 million, uh, but it still indicates that this was theirs to lose. Uh.

Speaker 1: 1:50:22

I found the left response to some of the far left responses utterly incoherent because they were both, like I literally saw people who were arguing that we needed not to support Harris within 24 hours argue that this was a sign of the irredeemable racism of American society, without you know, and it's kind of incoherent. I don't think it's just us. I mean, I see it across the board like uh, uh, you know, um, zionists who will say that they've never supported genocide, talking about the need to bomb people into non-existence just a few months ago, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, but it it does. It does actually bring out your point that these people, either they either don't know what they're saying they're so into the individual moment that there is no view of a lingerie or they can't mean. It are both, um, and I think this is also true with the actions around the Trump is fascism stuff. I think Trumpism can be very, very bad. I don't want to soften that. I think there are communities that might be hurt by this. In fact, I know there will be.

Speaker 1: 1:51:39

But it seems to me that I have a hard time squaring what people talk about in terms of fascism, but what they actually do. And I remember and I can say this now I remember when I was like, oh, I'd like to punch a fascist. And I was like if you actually believe that fascism was a real threat, you do a lot more than punching. I just want to point that out to you. And you don't. You know, um, and and I suppose I found that I found that really frustrating you know, four or five years ago, when I was like, okay, so you punch a fascist, but, um, do you actually think the civil war thing's real. Uh, are you willing to go to fight for it? No, you're not, like you know, in any real way. And, and to be fair, even when these people are coming out with with ar-15s, most of them aren't either. Not saying none of them were.

Speaker 1: 1:52:40

We saw some examples of it, but very few of them were, um, you know, you might be willing to riot and burn stuff down, but are you, is the violence going to go beyond that? And the answer is, and the answer was actually no, right? Um, we live in a time period where I think a lot of rightists would love for the left to try a January 6th, are, uh, the liberals would try a January, and I actually think the left would do it. Uh, um, to try a January 6th, the liberals would try January, and I actually think the left would do it to try January 6th, which I've always found interesting, because January 6th was both a legitimate threat to the order and a total farce, like simultaneously.

Speaker 1: 1:53:20

I was like, okay, so this is kind of both a clown show with some real elements of danger into it and you know. But then when I point out like people died, I then, when I point out like people died. I'm like the people who died were like protesters who were not in shape the protest and they had heart attacks and that one woman got shot, like that's, and a couple of police officers killed themselves afterwards for reasons that we like to link to the January stuff. But we don't know, I think maybe one police officer I say a couple, I only know of one for sure. So this seems like a weird narrative, right? What do we make of that? Do we think? I mean, look, I think prediction is always dangerous. I'm going to put a caveat on that but do we think we're going to see a liberal or left version of January 6th?

Speaker 2: 1:54:06

I mean, I don't. I don't think so. I think people have been insincere about the degree to which they really think that this is a threat. I think people don't actually believe most of what they say about it and I think that, generally, the emotion I'm seeing from people is depression. It's a demotivation. I think it will be a weaker response than we saw in 2016. I don't think we'll see anything even as big as the Women's March in 2016.

Speaker 2: 1:54:35

And, what's more, I think that the way that we would interpret this if it happened, it would be like college students occupying the president's building, the president of the university. If you had liberals that were doing something like January 6th, how would it be reported? How would it be covered? I think it would be treated like university students staging an occupation on campus, and those occupations on campus might make the administrators at those universities feel like they're really in danger. But liberals and leftists don't tend to take those complaints seriously when they come in that context, and I think it would be similar.

Speaker 2: 1:55:12

I think if we saw something like that, it would be kind of waved off as a group of college students who got unruly, even if some of them did do violence, and this is something that we see all the time. If college students on a liberal campus have a protest and there's some violence around the margins, the right will treat that violence as if it's all that happened, and then the establishment media will minimize that. We saw that with the Black Lives Matter protests, for instance. I think that that's probably the absolute highest horizon of possibility here, something like a campus occupation, but really I don't see it happening. It seems to me that people really don't believe the things that they've been saying, and if they did, they would act differently.

Speaker 1: 1:56:02

Right. It leads me to one question what do you do if people no longer know what they sincerely mean or not? Because that's like one thing I would say is I would think a lot of people are insincere, but they're not aware they're insincere, I think in the moment that they say it.

Speaker 2: 1:56:18

They think they believe it that words are action, in part because the concept of acting is so foreign to people today. The concept of actual politics is so outside the horizon of possibility that people pretend that words are action. I've talked to so many people who will start quoting speeches from politicians or things they've heard people say and that will be their argument for why there is a threat. It will just come down to what was said and how inflammatory and how awful. But this is not how politics is. Politics is about who's willing to shoot whom for what. That's where this goes. If you take it there and if people wanna take it there verbally, then they have to think through what that implies. There is the one thing that I think everybody should bear in mind is that we have heard from generals, colonels, heads of intelligence services, who have all said that they consider Trump a potential enemy and someone that they would have removed by force had he really very seriously attempted to stay on, you know, as opposed to yeah, what we've talked about that before.

Speaker 1: 1:57:33

Actually that like that. Like there have been many people in the military and trump doesn't have a military backing beyond some of the base, and while here I have a few conservative friends, some one of which I even did a patron episode, but he was like well, but they have the soldiers. And'm like when in the history of ever has that actually ever mattered If you have part, a large part, of the soldiers, if you have no generals and then I'll mention Flynn, as will the left, and I'm like no, you have to at least get to the rank of colonel.

Speaker 2: 1:58:03

The lowest rank of leadership for a military coup in modernity is colonels. You can have a colonel's regime. Anything lower than that is not sufficient. You look at polling among active duty troops and it's not at all, by any means 70% plus for Trump. Some polls will occasionally show Trump a little bit ahead or to have won a little bit more than half, but it's not like he's completely dominating among active duty troops. And in any case, yeah, you would need colonels or higher, and the intelligence services really hate him because they're very committed to NATO, to the American foreign policy project, and they view him as a potential threat to that project. So, anything he does, there are spies who leak things against him. There are spies who infiltrate anything he tries to start up or organize and those spies are very good at managing to persuade him and his allies that they're on side. I guarantee you that his movement is absolutely full to bursting with spies, probably already, and it certainly will be once they come in.

Speaker 2: 1:59:04

This is something that people just don't really wrestle with at all, and it just shows how not very serious people are about thinking about the state and thinking about politics and how it works.

Speaker 1: 1:59:16

Yes, virginia, there is a deep state, as I've said twice, but also it's not a conspiracy. One thing I would like to maybe think about as we tease this out a little bit is people like, oh, but Project 2025 says he's going to replace these people with loyalists, and I'm like, okay, it's only norms that have stopped presidents from doing that, because they did it a lot in the early half of the 20th century and the 19th century, where everything was staffed with loyalists. And that's why these norms that were just norms they were never laws, even regulations. Regulations, they were just norms that you don't do it after world war ii, um, that's faded.

Speaker 1: 1:59:51

Trump is going to do something about that. And they're like, oh, it's going to end the intelligence agency. And I'm like, okay, we've known about project 2025, I mean before the liberals started talking about it two years ago and, yes, there's some crazy stuff in there. I also will tell you that if you try to do all of it, it would lead to a world war, uh, or a military coup, like you start talking about, like replacing, and trump doesn't mean it. Like that seems to be a recruitment document. You know what I mean? Um, to get people that he can staff his, his administrative state with. But I'm also like he's also put, this has been out in the world for two years.

Speaker 1: 2:00:30

Do you not think the intelligence agencies have been preparing for this for a while? Like I mean, maybe they are that incompetent, maybe they are that that you know a lot of the. You know, I read a lot of right-wing. I've been read a row McIntyre recently and he seems to think, oh, they're too foxy to do this. And I'm like maybe you're underestimating what foxes do. So you know, like infiltrate your movement.

Speaker 2: 2:01:00

So these are people with a very particular set of skills. They really are, and if you were to fire all of them, you would not have a functional state. You have to have some of them, and once you're hiring some of them, you're going to get more than you would like to get, because they're going to do a very good job of infiltrating your hiring process. And this is not just true for the spies, it's true for all of the different parts of the administrative state. How many people do they imagine have the actual skills to operate the different parts of the state? How many of these people do they think exist?

Speaker 2: 2:01:36

It's not like you can elect an opposition and have a shadow cabinet. There is no shadow bureaucracy. There is no alternative administrative state. That includes hundreds of thousands of employees that you can simply hire to replace the existing bureaucracy. And, by the way, the idea that the bureaucrats should never be fired by the elected officials ever any of them a kind of preposterous kind of silly really. If anything, maybe that is something that ought to be shaken up a bit.

Speaker 1: 2:02:19

I think that will be shaken up. But I also think there's hard limits, particularly when it comes to the military. I'm like where are you going to get a bunch of loyalists from staffers and the GOP to go and take over the military?

Speaker 2: 2:02:32

And there are major offices that require confirmation by the Senate, Right? Well, I mean, those guys are going to have to do a lot of hiring and firing themselves and they're going to need Senate confirmation to do that Right themselves and they're going to need Senate confirmation to do that Right, and the idea that Trump, that Trump's Senate is totally Trumpist aligned, just seems to me also to be somewhat delusional. I mean for one. He's only going to have a handful of senators over 50. How many did he get, was it?

Speaker 1: 2:03:01

50? What was it? I think it's 50, like four or something like yeah, it's still very narrow and they hold, and if they hold the House, it's very narrowly too.

Speaker 2: 2:03:11

Yeah, and many of these senators are people who were threatening to take away his tariff power over the measly little tariffs that he deployed against China during the first administration, and these people credibly threatened to revoke his right to unilaterally tariff over that and that's why the trade war was so muted. A lot of these Republicans are libertarian free trade types still and a lot of them are not at all uncritically supportive of the administration. They support Trump, that they are completely controlled by him. That's not at all the case. You have to say certain things. If you're a Republican right now to win, and if you are unwilling to say those things, you're not going to win and you're going to get primary. But what you actually do in office is a whole different thing.

Speaker 2: 2:03:58

I think back to when McCain voted down the ACA repeal and replace right. Mccain is the one who voted it down because he was going to be out. He wasn't going to run again, because he was terminally ill. How many other Republicans in the Senate would have been that vote if McCain was not available to cast it? There's definitely some, but they wanted to create an impression that everyone supported repeal and replace except McCain. That's not the case. That's just an impression we have Right.

Speaker 1: 2:04:42

Just like Democrats propose super liberal policies like Medicare for all and Green New Deal, actually get on the floor when they are not, when they don't have enough of the executive to actually do it. Like you, you see that over and over and over and over and over again.

Speaker 2: 2:04:52

Harris co-sponsored the Bernie Sanders Medicare for all bill. Did that mean that she was actually for it?

Speaker 1: 2:04:58

No, right it is. It surprises me even people who are cynical about politics, who still take these people's statements at face value and not try to look at like can you game theoretic out the optics?

Speaker 2: 2:05:12

It's really not that hard, it's because words are all that's left now, so little else gets done that people only really pay attention to the words and to the language and they hope that the words and language mean something, because it's all they've got that they can do themselves.

Speaker 1: 2:05:29

Well, that brings me back to both. The tainter thing Society is too complicated for anybody to actually run, particularly off of a singular ideological vision. But two I think maybe this will be my last question for you this time is I've had a thesis about hyper-politics, like Anton Jaeger and them talk about, but I have actually concluded that hyper will be my. My last question for you this time is I've had a thesis about hyper politics, like anton yeager and them talk about, but I have actually concluded that hyper politics is the opposite of what a lot of people think it is. I think yeager would actually agree with me on this.

Speaker 1: 2:05:56

Um, that hyper politics is a form of depoliticization. Um, it is, you know, like we talked about, legit, like despair is a form of legitimization. Hyper-politics is a form of de-legit, uh, de uh, of de-politicalization, because, while you're focused on political subjectivity all the time, you are not doing anything that is actually political, in that you're not participating in local government, you're not advocating um for anything, you're not building coalitions. You're not building coalitions. You're not doing any of that. You are focusing on a. Now you know, analyzing things the way you would sports, like we talked about with ukraine, and and some of this comes from a real sense of powerlessness, even if you have power, um, you know, and as a person who gets conned into doing it, uh, I say this because I always say I'm not a pundit, I don't want to be a pundit, and yet I keep on having to be a pundit, whether I want to be or not. That I always say like what we do, like what I'm doing right now, what you and I are doing, is a precursor to politics, maybe, but if you just take this as a political statement, I don't know, it's just a hobby and and that's one of the things that I, that I've like struggled with about polarization in america, because you're right, it's like that that hydra stuck in a carpet, in that the polarization is real. It's not. People think it's fake. It's not fake, but it also isn't based on anything that can move and has no political forwardness or movement. So it's a polarization without effect. And what actually goes on is maybe there's changes in regimes. That matter are the people on margin, maybe there are targeted marginal groups, which there have, have been always. Actually, it's not that people forget about the aughts and you know the gay panics and all this, but that, at the same time, policy is remarkably consistent.

Speaker 1: 2:08:02

Like I point out that, like, the areas where Trump was successful were not undone by Biden by and large at all. They were. They were maybe rationalized, they were parceled out to different factions, but they weren't undone, which a lot of people take as like left wing hypocrisy. But I take it as like, like you do is like no one, it's not just left-wing hypocrisy. There's no politics there in the first place, like there's no movement possible. And you know, um uh, it's a disagreement that I have with doug lane. Doug lane thinks all these liberal, like dishonest people are going to be removed by this. Or I have a friend who thinks, well, this loss with HiRFs means we're finally going to get rid of the neocons or whatever. And I'm like I don't think so. That Hydra head will just pop up somewhere else. What do you make of that Last thought?

Speaker 2: 2:09:02

Anton's hyper-politics. I think this is an attempt to compete with fandoms. So as the enclaves, the four Fs, faith, family, fandoms and futurism become popular as ways of trying to escape politics. One of the ways that politics tries to compete with your state and treat politics like a fandom, like a sporting event. Make it entertaining and fun so that it has some of the character of that, and make it the basis of your family. Only date people who share your politics and bring it into the church and talk about your religion in relation to your politics. These are all ways of trying to prevent people from escaping from politics, but I do think that most people really do want out. At this stage, I think there is a very large block of people who really would like to not have to be caught up in any of this. So I really do think that there is a kind of subaltern that is genuinely depoliticized, that doesn't vote, that isn't registered to vote. It's a very large number of people who genuinely want all of this stuff to just leave them alone. And I also think that I like Anton's piece, but I do think that it understates the degree to which corporations structure people's social lives at this point.

Speaker 2: 2:10:24

One of the things I've noticed people on the left doing is making an argument that it's like the 1840s or the 1830s, that there's a kind of social lacuna that can be filled with new forms of social organizing.

Speaker 2: 2:10:36

I don't think that's true.

Speaker 2: 2:10:37

I think corporations and universities and the internet are the structures that play the dominant socializing roles now, and I think that a lot of the frustration, especially on the right, with the woke stuff, is really a frustration with the office environment and with office politics that they're not able to express in the workplace and so it's kicked out into these other spaces, because in the workplace they're terrified of what will happen if they express it because of the dominance of HR culture.

Speaker 2: 2:11:08

And this is something that I think has really fallen out of our discussion lately is is corporate culture, because a lot of what's going on is people hate, hate corporate culture. They hate being called into these stupid meetings where they are fed a bunch of very, very poor stuff that all of us, even if it's nominally left-wing or progressive stuff, we would all recognize this is not the highest instantiation, sharpest or most informative or most helpful stuff a person could hear or be given. There's a ton of this stuff that goes on in the corporate world now and people are really, really sick of it and I think that's driving a lot of the activity right now.

Speaker 1: 2:11:51

Yeah, I'm with you on that. Okay, so I think we should wrap this up. I don't want to keep people a whole lot longer. People don't know we were talking for a while beforehand. I really like your book. I think people need to read both your books together. I realized their library, their academic price, so ask for your library to get it, but ask for your library to get it, um, and read it. Um, I think it will help you understand what is going on right now. Um, and while you know, if you're in one of these heads, there can be like a feeling of a lot of movement too. I think this is one of the things that your book clarified to me why they can feel like there's movement and yet you look at the whole system, it's like nothing is changing. Well, I'm in a head of a Hydra. The body's still stuck Right, like it ain't going nowhere. So, and that's that's something, something to think about. Thank you, ben. Anything you'd like to plug out in the book?

Speaker 2: 2:12:52

Yeah, thanks. I'll just say here real briefly I know that the book is too expensive for many people. There will be a paperback within 12 months and I have been told that it will be significantly cheaper Maybe not as cheap as it should be, but significantly cheaper that it will be significantly cheaper Maybe not as cheap as it should be, but significantly cheaper. So if you are someone who wants to get it and you don't have a lot of money, I'm sorry. Please hang on and hopefully before too long I'll be able to put a book out that you can actually buy.

Speaker 1: 2:13:19

Yes, thank you so much. All right, and people should look up your website, follow your writings. I've enjoyed some of your recent writings. I actually go and stop at sub right Sublation to read pretty much you. I probably shouldn't say that too loud, but so I think that I think people should pick that up. Thank you so much, ben. Thank you.