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Varn Vlog
Liberal Socialism and the Challenge of Right-Wing Politics with Matt McManus
Professor Matthew McManus joins us to explore liberal socialism, the right's evolution, and the shifting global political landscape.
• Carlo Rossellini's work articulates a socialism that confronts both Marxist determinism and fascism
• Rossellini criticized Italian leftists for failing to understand fascism's emotional appeal
• Liberal socialism aims to make the promise of freedom true for everyone, especially the working poor
• Mouffe and Laclau's influential work acknowledges the importance of recognizing political enemies
• Axel Honneth introduces "social freedom" as a third dimension beyond negative and positive liberty
• Trump's presidency reveals the collapse of centrist neoliberalism and democrats' failure to offer alternatives
• European powers and Canada now defying American leadership shows declining US global dominance
• The left needs to focus on building coalitions rather than demanding ideological purity
Find Matthew's writing in Jacobin, Christian Socialism, Current Affairs, and Commonwealth, or reach him directly at mattmcmanusprof@gmail.com.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Hello, and I am talking to Professor Matthew McManus, not to be confused with the American television writer of the same name, which is funny. You are the author of liberal socialism. You're the author of a bunch of books, you study the socialism, but you also studied the right, and both will be topics of our discussion today. We're going to begin by picking up where we left off. In the liberal socialism book we talked a lot about mill and R H Tawny, to a lesser degree Bernstein and MacPherson, and a little bit of Rawls, my Brett Knorr, but we didn't talk as much about some of the other aspects of the book. Talk as much about some of the other aspects of the book. So I wanted to talk to you about Color Rossellini today and maybe get into where you think this is now after Moof and LaClau, and then we'll talk about the right, because in some ways I feel like Mouffe and LeClau's focus on populism. We can also throw Negri and Hart into this as well.
Matt McManus :Do like a 2000s throwback party. If you're in critical theory, right.
C. Derick Varn:I mean yeah, uh, do like a 2000s throwback party if you're in critical theory, right. I mean yeah, like when you or I were just probably either getting out of high school or undergraduates. Who's the hottest book? It is weird. The moof and lacroix and hart and egri were on the new york times bestseller list because those books are written in some of the most opaque language I've ever read.
Matt McManus :It was weird for me. I remember when I read hegemony and socialist strategy people were like the most popular book in left critical theory in 20 years. You know these kinds of euphemisms and I read it. I'm like damn, this is actually probably one of the most frustrating things to actually just have to go through. Not in terms of his content, although we can get to that right Just in terms of the style things to actually just have to go through.
C. Derick Varn:Not in terms of his content, although we can get to that right, just in terms of the style, I don't know weird. Yeah, it was a strange time. I it was one of those books that I was like are people actually reading this or do you just own it? To say you own it like it was.
Matt McManus :It was one of those um, yeah, what do they say? It was like a brief history, uh, of time, by stephen hawking, thomas m, thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and then, yeah, I guess, hart and Negri's Empire, the three books that will just sit there. Everybody will use them to impress their visitors and stuff and they'll never actually crack them open.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, piketty's, I did read most of that Piketty book. I skimmed through certain parts of it but I find it funny because I was like, oh, this book invokes Marx and has clearly never actually engaged with Marx much. I think actually, piketty's probably engaged with Marx more since he wrote that book than when he wrote that book.
Matt McManus :Well, to be fair to him, in 2014, he was definitely more egalitarian than the average economist. That's kind of the whole point of the book. But no, to be fair to him, in 2014, he was definitely more egalitarian than the average economist. That's kind of the whole point of the book. But now he just overtly identifies as a socialist. He's very happy to kind of argue for some pretty egalitarian reforms. So I always tell people don't judge a book by its cover and definitely don't prejudge somebody in terms of how radical they're willing to go. You got some critiques from people like David Harvey, seeing as he's internalized them. There are plenty of Marxist critiques you can make of his work still, but in terms of his socialist bona fides, I don't think that there's any begrudging in that.
C. Derick Varn:No, he does seem like a good center-left socialist. I mean, who knows where anybody lives up? I mean, like hell. Francis Fukuyama has become like a social democratic adjacent at this point, so who the fuck knows?
Matt McManus :I think that Francis Fukuyama is basically just like look anybody who's not fucking crazy and on the right. I'll kind of flirt with your team for a little while and if you want me to say some nice things about you, then sure you know I publish about a book a year. We'll throw some shade at you.
C. Derick Varn:We'll throw some shade at you. We'll show some compliments your way right. I wanted to talk to you about Carlo Rossellini, because we didn't talk much about Rossellini. But Rossellini is interesting because of the way in which he tries to triangulate a socialism that is in confrontation with both Marxism and fascism, but isn't exactly the same as like Nordic social democracy, nor anarchism. So what do you see as Carlo Rossellini's relevance to liberal socialism?
Matt McManus :Sure, well, part of it is. He just wrote a book called Liberal Socialism. That was very helpful, right. But look, in terms of his contribution, it's important to give a little bit of background.
Matt McManus :Carlo Rosselli was born quite wealthy, actually, but associated over the course of his life with the Italian left and various different socialist movements, depending on what was in vogue at the time. He was always very pro-democracy, which meant that from the beginning he was at least somewhat wary of the Bolshevist strains of the Italian left, although all that ceased to be particularly relevant when the fascists came to power. The Italian fascist party, right, and pretty much just jailed leftists across the country, including Rosselli, right. So it was actually in prison that Rosselli wrote a lot of liberal socialism and it really reads like that. It's kind of like Gramsci's prison notebooks, right.
Matt McManus :There's not an awful lot of references. There's a lot of taciturn characterizations of figures that you can't quite get away with talking about directly. It's very much a polemic, right. It's not exactly a scholarly. Well, let's look at this from the standpoint of, you know, x, y and Z perspectives kind of fierce in its implications, and really it's the only thing that he wrote of substance, right. And that's not because he wasn't a talented guy. I actually think he had a lot more to give, but he died fighting against Spanish fascism after he had been released from prison. Right, so very much, a guy who is willing to put words into action, and quite tragic.
Matt McManus :I think he had a lot more to give had he lived One of the key ideas that you find in his liberal socialism book that you found helpful to your own, other than the title. Well, there are a few different things, right, the two kind of core. Well, the three core parts of the book is one is quite a probing critique of fascism and why he thinks that the Italian socialists and the Italian left parties generally weren't able to confront it adequately. And this leads to the second part. A lot of the reason he blames Italian leftists for not being able to confront fascism is, he says, they never really took the time to understand its appeal. For a lot of the more mechanistically minded socialists who made up the dominant members of the socialist intellectual class, it was pretty much inevitable that capitalism was going to fall. You just needed to wait. And so Italian fascism was at best a kind of last hurrah for the bourgeoisie, united with different reactionary elements. All one needed to do was kind of hold out for the working class to eventually rise up against it, and then the thing would be hunky-dory. And Rosselli, I think quite rightly, and I know you have some sympathy with this, says no right, fascism had a real appeal, including to many of the proletariat, because they recognized that a lot of these mechanistic, deterministic or even scientistic ideas that are being floated by the left just don't really appeal to people's affective convictions. They really went for the gut with these appeals to nationalism, spiritualism, the resurrection of the people, and Rosselli is at no means saying that socialists should do the same. He's very critical of fascism as a species of irrationalist, reactionary thinking, but he says, if you fail to understand its appeal and you just kind of chalk it up to the latest turn of historical dialectic, you're not really being the best political agent and you're not actually thinking all that carefully about how to confront this every day, the way a political movement should once engaged in real and concrete politics. So that's something that I think is very important about his book, certainly for the time right Now.
Matt McManus :The second part of his book which you can be more critical of and I was more critical of in my own reading is he tends to assume that this mechanistic, deterministic approach to Marxism that he saw as being common on the Italian left at that point was just the way that Marx himself actually thought On his reading, and this is true of Bernstein as well. Marx just thought that the inexorable contradictions of capitalism were going to bring about the emergence of a society where the free development of each would be the condition for the free development of all. So there wasn't necessarily, on this reading at least, very much politically to do except to wait for this process to unfurl and take advantage of the right moment when it finally appeared. And you know Rosselli is very critical of this, saying no, the reality is that individual human actors still make a difference in history. You know, he's not a proponent of Carlyle and great man theory, right, but he does say, you know, even the smallest person can change the course of history, as Galadriel once put it, albeit in ways they don't necessarily understand. And again, he's critical of this version of Marxism, which he just takes to be Marxism, for rendering the left politically impotent in Italy when confronted with various fascist movements. And I mean in the book. I'm very critical of this reading of Marx, right, I say there's, without a doubt, plenty of Marxists out there that do have this very mechanistic and deterministic reading of him. I say that today, right, you know, there's plenty of people, you can go online, and that's just the way that they interpret Marx. But I think, if you actually look at the core texts of Marxism, some of which just weren't available to him. To be fair right, it's very obvious that Marx has a much less deterministic and much more contingency-minded approach to understanding history than this kind of reductive and orthodox view would suggest.
Matt McManus :And then the last part of his book obviously is an argument for liberal socialism, which kind of brings everything together. So his argument is to say look, once we recognize that individual human beings and movements can make history and make choices about where they want to go, we can recognize that there's actually a deep symmetry with liberalism on the part of socialism, since liberals have always understood the importance of the free individual trying to recreate his or her life, world in a way that'll be more emancipatory and free. Now the socialist element of this comes in. As Rosselli says, the reality is that by and large liberals have been indifferent to achieving freedom, whether historical or personal freedom for the working poor. And what socialism is going to do for the first time in history is make the promise of liberalism true for everyone, but in particular for the poor. And he discusses a variety of different normative arguments for this. You know the importance of equality and emancipation.
Matt McManus :But the book more or less ends with this kind of promise to deliver a robust account of liberal socialism that will be popular, dynamic and able to confront reactionary forces across Europe. And again, sadly, he died before he was able to ever produce something that actually lived up to that promise. Well, he had better things to do right across europe. And again, sadly, he died, uh, before he was able to ever produce something, uh, that actually lived up to that promise. Uh well, he had better things to do right fighting fascists is a noble cause in any generation I mean.
C. Derick Varn:well, um, rosselli is an interesting like contrast to both gramsci and uh, amigo bordiga I, who basically took who is not actually, you know, necessarily super messianistic, but in the terms of fascism, never thought that fascism should receive special opposition from socialists, because he just thought it was a form of capitalist government and you should oppose it like you should any other capitalist government, and that includes not making alliances with liberals. And Rosselli is basically coming at it from almost the exact opposite standpoint. And they're all in prison at around the same time. So it's a very interesting set of contrasts there.
Matt McManus :Yeah, I want to add. I mean, you can compare his work to Gramsci in some interesting ways. Now, I'm not here in any way implying that Rosselli is a thinker on a par with Gramsci right, that'd be a very foolish thing to say. But Gramsci himself was interested in why it is that, again, these more mechanistic and deterministic accounts of Marxism that were very centered around the economy and the motor of history didn't turn out to pan out right, and why so many of the working classes ended up being quite happy to vote for Mussolini or at least willing to subordinate themselves to him. And a lot of the stuff that he wrote about in prison, of course, related back to how he wrote about how he wrote about how he wrote about how he wrote about how hegemony operates, why it is that people don't necessarily work to pursue their own interests, certainly their class interests. And Marcelli was pissed off about the same kind of things, right, he just tackled it from a somewhat different direction.
C. Derick Varn:And it's interesting also to contrast him with a lot of the rest of the liberal tradition in Italy, because the liberal tradition in Italy, if we're kind of direct, is a lot uglier than the liberal tradition English speaking countries. I mean cause you look at, like Pareto um Rabin, who wasn't a liberal, he was a former anarchist, but the, the elite school which mostly did come out of Italian liberalism, with some exceptions, robelmichaud being one of the exceptions.
Matt McManus :Also worth noting that when Mussolini was first in power, prior to the 1930s and the Depression, his government was actually famous for adopting a somewhat liberal you know, in the broad sense economic approach. Right Caught a lot of benefits to people. Obviously, crushed unions had the support of many different liberals and industrialists throughout the country. All this is well known Right. In fact, there are some economists who characterize him as imposing a kind of austerity on Italy Right Now. Things shifted in the 1930s, obviously with the Depression, because Mussolini was not a man of deep economic convictions, or any convictions really, aside from Mussolini. Now Mussolini forever right. But you know to your point, there were a lot of reasons why Rosselli was kind of going out on a limb to call himself a liberal socialist at that point, because there are definitely a lot of good reasons why socialists would be then as now, wary of any kind of association with liberalism yeah I mean when we think about the.
C. Derick Varn:When I think about the names I associate with italian liberalism. In specific, it's like pareto and it's just um. And these are not. You know, these are people who were frankly somewhat fascist sympathetic if they had lived long enough and and their, their devotees, were fascist sympathetic or to part of this day.
Matt McManus :I mean, uh, pareto is Jordan Peterson's favorite economist, right right, exactly, um, so it's interesting.
C. Derick Varn:This does kind of get to, you know, my reading. You know we've gone back and forth for me, as, uh, I'm more skeptical of liberal socialism than you, but I do think, know, we've gone back and forth for me, as, uh, I'm more skeptical of liberal socialism than you. But I do think that we have to admit that all this, both the, both the socialistic and a lot of the weird authoritarian, actually do have legitimate roots and enlightenment, liberal, uh, and liberalism in the quote, classical sense, and that we shouldn't be seeding classical liberalism to the libertarians as an idea like it's not, like we also are. Even if you don't consider yourself a liberal and I don't, um, I admit that my tradition emerged out of that uh, and it has to be kind of acknowledged that. You know, marxism didn't come from nowhere.
Matt McManus :Yeah, and I think that you and I are kind of uniquely okay with that, in part because we spent a lot of time reading right-wing thinkers right, no-transcript, quite interesting thinkers credit where due who are like the Enlightenment was a mistake, just the whole thing. Not any of it is worth redeeming and we should really go back to. You know you take your pick.
C. Derick Varn:Aristotle, the Habsburgs, aristotle, yeah, paul Godfrey's the austral hungarian empire.
Matt McManus :A lot of courtesy arvin is like we need to go back to, you know, the pre-english civil war.
C. Derick Varn:You name it right yeah, like we need jacobites, or some of them are even like let's bring back the capatians, uh, the carolingians or the Morovians, like it's just, you know, it's you know, but not too far back, because we don't want any of that semi-equality that you see in the early Roman Republic. So it's got to be somewhere between like 100 AD and 1500 AD.
Matt McManus :We don't want to go so far back that we get to like polyamorous communism right, that's where you know we got to cut it off.
Matt McManus :So yeah, yeah, and you know to your point. I mean I don't have any problem with people saying they just can't bring themselves to call themselves a liberal, socialist or identify with liberalism in any way, shape or form. I mean my buddy, ben Burgess, who I know you've had some fights with right, has said that to me often right, he's like you know I agree with a lot of what you're saying. It's just if you had lived in America, is what he always tells me. No, it's just too hard a pill to swallow calling yourself a liberal of any sort. I'm like I, that's just kind of what I'm hoping for.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah yeah, friend, friend of the show and personal interlocutor and arguer of mine. I mean, ben and I are pretty close but we don't agree on that. We agree on a lot when faced with the right and even some liberals. We don't agree on much when you're actually dealing with the left, but it's. I do find it interesting that, like he's like I can't go there and I'm like, well, from my perspective, an analytic Marxist is basically a liberal anyway.
Matt McManus :Well, I mean, you should tell him that I've been trying to push him that way too. It's like look, you're almost all the way there, right, it's just in what he's glad to say. Just a little push right, and then you'll be and then you'll be.
C. Derick Varn:So this brings us, though, to the interesting liberal-ish developments of the 1970s, 80s and 90s that emerged in sort of post operismo scenario, post-autonomia in Italy, and then whatever the fuck was going on in France. Whenever I go back to the left in France in the 70s and 80s, it's like a weird non-Euclidean geometric tree where, like we need topological geometry to make sense of that shit, right yeah these guys were malice.
C. Derick Varn:Then they became left communists and then later on they were britain ultra nationalists and then this group was was, uh, socialist. And then they got into post-modernism and then these guys were socialists and they were left communists and all of a sudden they were like making common cause with nazis to deny that the holocaust happened, so that we could not justify the popular that's kind of what I enjoy about french philosophy and french leftism, though it's like man, like people are complaining right now.
Matt McManus :It's like all american politics has gotten weird. There's all these kind of weird fucked up ideologies that appear. It's like, yeah, just go back to france throughout the 20th century. All All of them are there, right. It's the people who are like I am a very, very, very conservative, bordering on fascistic Marxist, or I'm a Gramscian ultra-nationalist, and you're like, well, whatever, fuck it, just fine.
C. Derick Varn:It does, controversial thesis that no one on either side of this ocean will like. I think, the French and the Americans. We are way more alike than anyone wants to admit, and that is why we don't like each other.
Matt McManus :Oh, but did you hear what the Trump administration said just this week? Right, you know, if it wasn't for the Americans, all the French would be speaking German right now.
C. Derick Varn:Right, Well, if it wasn't for the French, we'd all still be fucking British.
Matt McManus :This would already be Canada. That comment also pissed me the fuck off. It's just nobody in this country ever going to fucking acknowledge the Soviet Union's role in World War II. We're just going to be like, oh, that whole part of the world, that whole war, that's just going to be like that screen in old video games.
C. Derick Varn:It's like, oh, it's just nothing happening there, it's off screen, screen out of mind yeah, you know, um you that it's funny because it's just like you know, the the. The russians lost more than anyone else and arguably, if germany had fought a run front war with either the United States and Britain in what the resistance in France or the Soviet union, uh, without it being two fronts, germany probably would have won that war. Oh, I have no doubt.
Matt McManus :I mean, um, richard Evans, who's, uh, probably the best English historian on Nazi Germany, points out that, like there was never anything less than 70% of Axis forces concentrated on the Eastern Front after 1941. Usually it was a bit more like 80, right, you could even just compare the scale of the victories, right? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not undermining the Western Allied contribution, right, the victories in Tunis were very, very important. Battle of the Balls very important. The material resources given to the Soviet Union which the Soviets themselves didn't like to acknowledge, very important, right. But you know, in Tunis, you know, one of the biggest victories the Western Allies won, they took about 300,000 Axis prisoners, big, big victory, right.
C. Derick Varn:Compare that to Stalingrad, where about a million, 1.2 million Axis soldiers died, and Stalingrad, where about a million, 1.2 million Axis soldiers died and a couple hundred thousand were captured Just a totally different scale, yeah, Although I mean the one thing I do like to remind people when we get really into this it would have helped if Stalin had not tried to play 35-dimensional chess and then armed Hitler.
Matt McManus :Yeah, In the late 30s, when people sit there and they offer apologies for Stalin being like oh you know, he was the one who completely defeated Hitler because he was the genius who knew what he's doing Really. I mean in 1941, when the tanks were advancing on Moscow and he was not doing anything for days. I'm sure at least it must crossed his mind once or twice. He's like man, did I ever fuck up bad, didn't I?
C. Derick Varn:He disappeared to his dacha for a week. Anyway, I'm really going to stop here. Yeah, I don't want to get into this because I kind of find the pro and anti-Stalin both sides of those debates really obnoxious. But when I think about the war I'm like he was a good wartime leader by 42, you know, by 42 and 43, because he learned to delegate.
Matt McManus :Yeah, I could just learn like look, I'm not, I can't run this whole fucking thing myself, so maybe it's better if I let, if I trust a few people provisionally but and I don't want to, I don't want to downplay that but like he, he thought that Hitler was more rational than Hitler was.
C. Derick Varn:Um, I mean, he really like reading his diaries that he really does seem surprised. Like he did what? And they're still at what. Like um, I mean so much so that when his spies in in japan were telling him that the germans were amassing at the border, he didn't believe them I don't.
Matt McManus :And they even told him like the invasion is imminent, like prepare right now like it's coming in any day and he was like, oh, it's got to be a deep fake, right it? It's like really, Do you really think all that stuff that Hitler said about you know the sub-human Slav and creating a gigantic empire in the East was just something he was going to forget about? Like he went on and on about it continuously, right Way more than he talked about taking over the West.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, exactly Like if you were Hitler's friend.
Matt McManus :he of the West, yeah, exactly If you were Hitler's friend. He's the kind of guy that's like oh, how are your kids? By the way, have you heard my plan about turning Ukraine to?
C. Derick Varn:an Ash-laden German colony. Let's get into that. Anyway, I know I'm going to get comments on that in the show notes. So I do find it interesting though, because basically the middle of the 20th century, um, you have, you have the Nordic social democracies, you have Western European, uh, post Soviet, uh Marxism, which develops into Euro-communism, which I wouldn't entirely say was liberal, but wasn't totally not either and by the 80s and 90s you get, I mean, yeah, a bunch of very strange ideologies, particularly in France and Italy, get this kind of liberal, populist socialism. That's kind of I mean, at the time, even as a young non-socialist, I wasn't a socialist when I was reading stuff, I was actually a conservative, but I think I called it half-ass Marxism in my 20s. So like I think I called it half-assed Marxism in my 20s, so like I always think of Thurber's book from Marxism and post-Marxism, and like this is what we get at the end of that Muffin LeClau. It's hard for people post-2010, I think, to get how important they were because that book was everywhere, right, absolutely everywhere.
Matt McManus :You couldn't pick up a text in critical theory for about 20 years without like the requisite citation of hegemony and socialist strategy it's hegemony and socialist strategy and antagonistics.
C. Derick Varn:Those are the two books by them you had to read. So in which ways are they liberal and which ways are they not? I mean, in your book you argue that they actually kind of represent a big tension in socialist thought, so I wanted to go on that, and then we'll go into Axel Hanif and Habermas, my least favorite philosopher.
Matt McManus :I mean, hanif and Habermas are just the most exciting people to talk about. Well, look, I would actually push back on the characterization of Laclau and Mouffe as a duo, as liberal socialists, because I'm very sure Ernesto Laclau would reject that characterization. Mouffe, though, by the 1990s embraced calling herself a liberal socialist explicitly and has more or less wore that label, I want to say proudly but consistently, all the way up into 2018, when she writes for left populism but Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, just to kind of provide a bit of context was a seminal book. I do not particularly like it and I want to be clear that I'm moderately critical of Mouffe in the text. But essentially what Laclau and Mouffe argued, there is something that everyone'sClau argue. Well, actually, just leaning really, really heavily on class or the working class as the vehicle for emancipation is not good enough, and it's certainly not going to allow you to overcome the various forms of hegemonic domination that operate in society, and that operates in multifaceted ways, depending on whether we're talking about patriarchy or white supremacy or heteronormativity. You get the idea right. So, essentially, the book concludes with an argument for what they sometimes call the post-Marxist approach to socialist politics, stitching together these different groups who are marginalized in some way, shape or form in society, giving them an enemy that would unite them all together. That was a very important part of their work, this kind of agonistic dimension to it, and then trying to use the coalition that you form to agitate for what was sometimes called an agonistic democracy right, a much more democratic way of life where, rather than trying to subsume the differences in society, we would allow them to exist and to, if not struggle, at least push up against one another, without that ever becoming antagonistic, even if it sometimes could be agonistic and, truthfully, like a lot of left theory at the time, that was very Pomo inspired.
Matt McManus :It's not exactly clear what the practical implications of this are supposed to be. Sometimes they would point to real world examples which some socialists were quite sympathetic to, including myself, by saying look, rather than adopting this kind of conciliatory, dialogical attitude towards conservatives, for example, the left needs to be much more willing to name enemies and mobilize people on that basis. And that's where they can be critical of a certain kind of liberal centrism, at least the attitude of liberal centrism. Think about somebody like Chuck Schumer just this week. Right, that's exactly who they were kind of targeting, this person who would say well, you know there are some good Republicans out there, maybe if I model, you know, dialogical and cross-partisan behavior, you know they're going to come on board. Moof and Laclau would say that's completely well, naive, right, it's not going to happen, especially when you're forcing, confronting reactionary forces.
Matt McManus :But then you know, by the 1990s, mouffe at least did start to specify the ingredients in her politics a little bit more. And it's a very weird stew, as you probably know, right, because she's very interested in postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida. She's also deeply intrigued by the writings of Carl Schmitt, who I'm sure all your listeners know is the fascist philosopher par excellence or fascist jurist par excellence from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. And then she identifies as a liberal or a liberal socialist, albeit one who does not write all that much about class-based antagonisms. So how does this all fit together? Well, kind of in the way I described, but with some specifically Mouffian kind of amendments.
Matt McManus :She says look, liberalism is committed at its best to this idea that we are not going to try to eradicate deep pluralism, and that is very much an idea that socialists need to get on board with. And she's critical of certain Marxist or left theorists that imagine that in a post-liberal society there's going to be so much solidarity that differences are going to be effaced comes in where she says part of the problem with this is liberals have always underestimated the extent to which the differences in society are going to produce antagonisms, engender the sense that there are enemies that we need to overcome. So we need to have a kind of Schmittian awareness of this and be willing, as liberal socialists, to name names and call out the people who are trying to eliminate difference precisely. And then the postmodern dimension of this was a kind of wariness again of any kind of totalizing discourse or totalizing approach to political identity. That suggests, you know, in a socialist future, differences of race, differences of gender, differences of sexual orientation will be overcome, or no longer be of any way in any way, shape or form politically significant, and will become one community without the need for any kind of politics. Right, sirka Derrida Foucault and many others?
Matt McManus :She's like you know, there's never going to be a moment where we arrive at the end of history or a big T truth moment where we have access to just the way everything should be, and so we're just going to have to accept there's going to be politics for the foreseeable future. That's a simplification. I want to be clear, but I think it's about as down to earth as I can make that work without getting into a lot of jargon.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, well, I mean, I'm actually sympathetic to the last point. I I do sort of get sort of tired when people are like, oh, racism will just go away, uh with, uh with socialism. I'm like racism as we know it will go away, but that I've studied the soviet union in china too much to think that it just magically goes away because you deal with class antagonism. There's, there was, all kinds of ethnic pogroms that broke out during the Yuzov China and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Two events that I have, you know, the Yuzov China I have a solely negative view on, that's the purges, for those of you who don't call it by its Russian name and the Great Proletarian Social Revolution. I actually somewhat speculatively, but I actually think it prevented a civil war, and so, if you know anything about civil wars in China, they tend to be some of the bloodiest affairs in human history, see the Boxer Rebellion, which killed I think it killed what like 20 times the US Civil War, and we don't even call it a war.
Matt McManus :It's just like. It's also astonishing right, Because almost nobody in the West knows about that right, and this conflict was taking place on a scale that was vastly larger than almost anything else that was going on in the world at the time.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, it's Americans, particularly American socialists. Learn your Chinese History and start before 1929. Um Like, but anyway.
Matt McManus :So what your Uncle Byrne Is giving you for homework.
C. Derick Varn:I'm a teacher, that's what I do. Um you also address at the end of your book, um, the kind of uh interesting and somewhat parallel development in the post, uh, the post adorno hochheimer, frankfurt school. Um, you, for you, you focus on axel honneth. I mean the, the, the three biggies of the, what we might call the last generation of the frankfurt school would be raymond geist, uh, or goise, um, I mean goise uh, axel honneth and habermas. And people know my opinion of habermas. I think I call him a traitor, like three times a year. But um, I just ritually excite him. But um, axel honif and and habermas are interesting because it's a, it's a shift back towards uh, euro-liberalism, in in socialist thought, in a in like a marxianegelian sense that parallels Mouffe and Lacalle and Mouffe and Babiot.
C. Derick Varn:Oh, noberto Babiot yeah, but is not the same as? So you want to go into that a little bit?
Matt McManus :Sure. Well, one of the reasons I included Honneth in the same chapter as Mouffe is I actually think they pair together quite well, oddly enough, because where Mouffe is very insistent on this kind of postmodern, deconstructionist, agonistic approach to politics, which has its virtues, I mean, like you, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that there is a problem with a liberalism that's afraid to name names and recognize that politics can be a struggle Right. However, move in terms of what the practical implications of liberal socialism should be, it's very vague. It's very, very unclear to me what an agonistic democracy, let alone a liberal agonistic democracy, is going to look like in practice, let alone what the socialist component of this is going to be. If we take seriously the call for economic democracy, right. Honneth, on the other hand, in Habermas especially, is very much of the school of thought. That reason shall prevail. As you know, it once went and it's always sunny in Philadelphia that dialogue, rationalization can continue to extend to all parts of the life world. We can negate the impulse towards an intensifying agonistic politics if we adopt the right epistemic and linguistic approaches and then tries to systematize that in a wide variety of different ways. So I do want to stress that work operates at a very high academic level generally, but whereas MUFs at the very least has the virtue of being um, agonistic and politically minded, uh, honneth especially, and hopper moss for that matter, uh, the kind of price paid for their scholarship is a lot of this works at a very high level of remove, right? Uh, I mean hopper moss just published a three volume history of philosophy that I've reviewed the first two volumes just this week. It's quite interesting, right. But calling it, you know, a call to arms would be well, not just an overstatement, right, a kind of wild, wild overestimation of what the book is going to do In terms of like what Honneth argues specifically.
Matt McManus :What's interesting about him is he's still very sympathetic to the broadly left aims and socialist aims of the Frankfurt School, but he thinks that Hegel by himself, for the most part, possesses the conceptual resources not only to agitate for a critical theoretical perspective with some important assists from Marx, radical perspective, with some important assists from Marx but also to tell us what kind of ethical society we should move towards, right? So, just very briefly, one of Han's most interesting claims is that Western civilization and Western society has been entrenched by two concepts of freedom for too long. The first concept of freedom is the classic, negative conception of freedom that we're all familiar with. This idea of don't tread on me, and Honneth says actually socialists by and large have been too indifferent to the importance of negative or classical liberal liberties. Right, he says there really is something that's valuable about asking to be left alone to your own devices, at least in some spaces.
Matt McManus :Then the second concept of liberty that he also has a lot of commendation for is, of course, the positive concept of liberty. This is all drawn from a criticism of Isaiah Berlin's essay. And the positive concept of liberty, of course, is about empowerment, or expanding the array of choices that you have available to you in your life. You know the idea being well Bernie Sanders or someone like that. If I'm denied access to health care because I'm not able to afford it, the array of options that will be available to me in life are likely to become a lot more narrow, because I'm going to be spending all my time working at a Denny's trying to earn enough money so that I can, you know, get my new hip.
Matt McManus :But what is interesting about Honath is he adds a third dimension of freedom, what he calls social freedom, which he aligns with the call for the democratization of life, society that is, for the most part, free of hegemony, where people are capable of taking a kind of rational distance from the forms of life in which they inhabit and to ask themselves if they are genuinely emancipatory in the way that they should be and if they aren't, to exercise their social freedom in order to remake society.
Matt McManus :And, as I point out in my recent review of his book, he starts to extend this to the workplace as well, in a manner that I think is very admirable, where he says we should experiment with things like worker co-ops, perhaps even, you know, subsuming large parts of the economy to, you know, socialist ends. It's not exactly clear to me how different this is from what's sometimes called the Republican concept of freedom, which is very much in vogue in some left circles right now. You know, see Bruno Leopold's book Citizen Marx. Right, but it's a very admirable project, right in some ways. The problem I have with it is, again, if you're looking for Haneth to Haneth, to get political juice for a kind of radical project or to feel animated in confrontation with reactionary forces, you're just not going to get that right. What you're going to get instead is a stately 500-page book that will talk about every interpretation of Hegel that has come across over the last 50 years, some very fine-grained analysis of this, and that's what you're going to have, and there's nothing wrong with that, right?
C. Derick Varn:I just think that sometimes I think moose work would benefit from being a little bit more like clonus, uh, and sometimes I think clonus work would be benefit from a little bit more of the energy and agonism that you see in moose work um, I guess that does kind of bring us to now, and I I wanted to ask you, as we talk about now, the last time we talked we were in the waning stages of of good old Joe Biden, his extreme dotage, uncle Joe, but but ice cream instead of steel, you know. Nonetheless, now we're in Trump's second administration and we've seen a transformation of the right that is even different from the first transformation that Trump brought to the right, and it's had unforeseen consequences in many directions.
Matt McManus :You don't say I mean, you told me back in even 2024, that Canada would be precipitously close to calling america, uh, you know, enemy number one? Uh, I tell you that it's time to stop hitting the bong so much. Let's just put it that way, right? Yeah, and if you'd have told me that, watch the south park movie a few too many times, right?
C. Derick Varn:and if you'd have told me that we'd actually wag the dog ourselves. Uh, after you know, um, for ensuring to the point of. Why do we even need to make canadist like? Um, you know we had a totally integrated economy. Um, you know, the only thing we didn't share was a currency and, uh, the and to see that theoretically dismantled in a few months. Um, and for those of you who read your project 2025, it isn't in there. There's nothing in there about a trade war canada.
Matt McManus :Um, I mean trump, just like tariff is the most beautiful word.
C. Derick Varn:Most beautiful word, right, I think that's a big part of the motivation are you seeing an attempt and a rebuff at normalizing with China and then that going to pot very quickly or any number of things? Because people are like, oh, it's all in Project 2025. I'm like, no, this is even weirder than that. Even I thought maybe this was going to be like trump won and the project 2025 shit was like his old white papers from 2016 and nope. But it also isn't really a blueprint either, because it's much stranger. Um, how do you know? I think, on one hand, a lot of people see the Democrats even now I mean even especially now as a weak response to all this. I mean, I was reading the paper and I think that the popularity and general approval of the Democratic Party has fallen from 2008, where it's 60% to 29% today. And it's not because people like Trump. They didn't like the Democrats anyway. It's former Democrats being incredibly frustrated with the lack of action.
Matt McManus :I mean, look at Chuck Schumer the other day. Right, I mean the first little bit of leverage he had on Trump give us something or the whole government will shut down. He somehow managed to go into a meeting with Republicans, come away with absolutely nothing and they got everything that they wanted. And it's like Jesus, fucking Christ, man, can't you come up with any better deal than, ok, we get nothing. They take a giant shit on us and then they get whatever it is that they want from us. Please, sir, I want some more right?
C. Derick Varn:it's just fucking baffling to me right me too, and and so on one hand, it would seem like liberalism as it is associated with parties like that, at least in the united states. Now we can talk about how this may be helping the prospects of liberalism abroad. Um, didn't save Germany, but, uh, although we can really thank the SPA day and the greens for that more than anything else. Um, but we've seen all kinds of pivoting in the European union. Um, if you had told me in December that we wouldn't be looking at a right-wing canadian government by by the summer, um, I would have laughed at you, and now I'm like the liberals may survive. Any of they lose.
Matt McManus :They're not going to lose by much wow, they can actually get a majority government and you know be far stronger than they were going into this. Yeah, it's baffling.
C. Derick Varn:It is baffling. So it seems like both a complication for, and a moment of, liberal socialism, because illiberalism, seemingly, has had a backlash to a backlash. We had a backlash to the kind of nothingism and I use that as a slur that was used for a certain group in China in 1978, which was the Chinese center leadership. But it basically means you do so little that we barely remember you in history. You do so little that we barely remember you in history, and I'm not a popular frontist. Still, I want people to understand that before people misunderstand me, but it does seem like there is a scramble to redefine a lot of these terms and views in light of where we're at, and views in light of where we're at. I mean I would not have guessed that Ezra Klein would be pushing an Elizabeth Warren agenda Not that I agree with it, but I wouldn't have predicted it either.
Matt McManus :Like, yeah, I mean, I was at a Bernie rally just two weeks ago, right, it was a weekend off election season and it was 10,000 people showed up right To a tiny little high ago. Right, it was a weekend off election season and almost 10,000 people showed up right to a tiny little high school. Right, there was an overflow room for the overflow room, right. Really astonishing stuff. I think that to your broader question. I think what it's. What has become very, very clear is that a kind of centrist neoliberalism that dominated the Democratic Party and, for that matter, many liberal parties across the Western world is, if not in terminal decline, very much in life support, certainly in the United States and I predict elsewhere also, although like you said, trump might help revive it in some places like Canada, and I think that there are very good reasons for this kind of neoliberalism to have become so profoundly unpopular.
Matt McManus :It had different wings. There was a more right-wing version of it, a more left-wing version of it, but for the most part, you know, it was defined by a lack of concern for ordinary people in the country, and the people who manage the leading parties were not shy about expressing this lack of concern for what ordinary people thought. I mean. For me, the moment I knew that the democrats were going to be in trouble in 2024 was, of course, when candidate clinton, uh back in the day, uh was asked a question. I think it may even been on the video or some talk show, uh, where she was like what would you say to voters who are concerned? Uh, that the Democrats aren't offering enough and are maybe doing a lot of bad things in Gaza. And her response was get over yourself, right. Look at the alternative. What else are you going to do? And I thought to myself like Jesus Christ, right? So your attitude towards the voters isn't that you have to justify why they should vote for you. They should get over their hang ups about this and get on board with your program, because the only other option is Donald Trump. Right Now, I want to point out in the 2024 election, things were a lot closer than Republicans tried to make it out Right. Had a couple hundred thousand votes in swing states gone another way, we would have wound up with President Kamala Harris. But clearly enough people, when presented with this kind of attitude and this kind of program, when told the choices neoliberal centrism or Donald Trump, they thought well, thank you very much, but I'm going to take Donald Trump. Let's do it.
Matt McManus :And I think for any kind of liberal party to be effective in the future, certainly in the United States, it needs to be committed to an awful lot more than just this extremely technocratic approach to politics that says we're going to try to assemble just enough groups together to form a winning electoral coalition. We're going to have every little one of them a little bag of goodies, but not too much, right, because we can't go crazy and then we're going to hope that all these people are going to turn out on election day, right? What the Republicans have very clearly understood is that to mobilize people, you do need to offer a kind of vision and, to use Mercer's term, a kind of agonism. Now, the vision that they are offering is terrible, right, as we are seeing unfolding right before our eyes. Right, and there's a reason to your point why I think Trump has become extremely unpopular very quickly for most Americans. Right, but the Democrats have done very, very little thus far to offer a competing and compelling vision of what the country should look like, and I think that if they were to be smart, they would recognize that.
Matt McManus :There's a reason why people like Klein and AOC and Bernie Sanders are the thought leaders and the movers and shakers in the party like right now. Right, as in many ways they have been for quite some time. Right, that's because people really want a to know who the enemy they have to oppose is. One to the oligarchs is a good example, and what a positive vision of the country will look like and you know they lay that out One that's going to be committed to Medicare for all post-secondary, for all re-immunization you name it right Now. From a socialist angle, there are, of course, a lot of reasons to be critical of this as reformist, inadequate, etc. But I do think that it would definitely be a hopeful thing if we were able to get the Democratic Party to pivot from being an intransigently centrist party without any kind of interest in advancing a leftist agenda and very hostile to leftists within it, to one that was more open to discussing more radical kinds of social transformation.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I mean, I find this somewhat fascinating. I'll give you a story, because I was watching the defeat of Jamel Bowman in his rallies in New York. Aoc and Bernie both went and sized them up and tried to help him out, right after endorsing Biden. And to tell you how different it was just a year ago, less than a year ago, there was 500 people in the greater New York area, one of the most left-friendly, densely populated areas in the United States, at this rally, versus today, where you can get 10,000 people to hear Bernie because at least he's saying something against the Trump administration. And yes, I would probably, and no, I wouldn't probably. I know I would still be complaining about the Democrats if Bernie was their leader, but I would actually feel like at least I was going somewhere when I was complaining about them. 80-year-old neoliberals and you know, like Schumer can even I can't even make fun of them and feel good, they're so weak.
Matt McManus :Oh I know, Especially when they'll sit there and they'll bitch like this isn't the party of Reagan. It's like man, reagan fucking was 40 years ago. Man 40 years ago. Like get with the fucking time. They don't give a shit about not being the party of Reagan anymore. And also, let's be clear, reagan was a fucking asshole also.
C. Derick Varn:I know it is kind of special that appeal and it feels like they're trying to do the same thing that they did about George W Bush, because I heard that too and I'm just like this is a completely different phenomenon, you don't know how to fight it, and so it's interesting on one hand. I mean, the other thing that we've seen is the kind of rise and stagnation of the return of, uh, sectarian marxism. Um, we've seen the, the trotskyist parties have mostly collapsed, with the exception of the rci, rca, rcp, depending on which country you're in and, dear communists, can you come up with more names? How many rcps do there need to be? Um, uh anyway? Um, our workers parties, while we're at it, but nonetheless, um uh, except for them, but mostly other crotchets have gone. We've seen a lot of Marxist-Leninist groups emerge, but they've taken on bizarre ideologies Marxist-Leninism, duganism, marxist-leninism John Calhoun thought, I don't know.
Matt McManus :I mean talk to Steve Bannon, right? Steve Bannon is a big fan of lennon yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's we're.
C. Derick Varn:We're in a very bizarre time and we've also seen the growth of something that we, that we, you and I were talking earlier about france, where you'd see these weird french, uh ideologies emerge, you know, emerge, um, but we have seen that again where we've seen, like super conservative, former ultra leftist, marxist, leninism, or you know.
Matt McManus :Maga communism.
C. Derick Varn:Maga communism or liberal socialism, but we like trump even more than the mega communist or whatever like yeah well listen.
Matt McManus :If you're a liberal socialist that has anything good to say with trump, don't fucking cite my work in any way, shape or form, unless you're willing to sit there and be like this is all trash or something yeah, the, the.
C. Derick Varn:So I, I, I do think we're in a particularly weird moment and a lot of people will be reaching for ideologies again because, um, there isn't a clear answer for for where these sectarian movements can move. Um, and the dsa seems to be back on the snse. I, I mean, one of the ironies of the Biden administration is, at the beginning of the Biden administration the DSA was almost 100,000 people and at the end of it it was somewhere between 55,000 and 65,000 people. So it lost between a third and half of its membership in those four years. And it is interesting to see because it seems to be back on the incline again. But it also there's I mean, there's kind of a low-key Cold War within the DSA between Democratic Party adjacent factions and factions that want to party.
C. Derick Varn:And then there's the factions that want to party are like split five different ways.
Matt McManus :Well, yeah, that's the problem, right? It's like I've been asked that problem more than anything else, like do you think that we should separate and create a new left party? It's like I'm not opposed to hearing the idea. The problem would be what kind of fucking left party do you want to tell? Do you want to create?
C. Derick Varn:right, because, right, I don't know if you've ever spent any time on like the left left or the far left, but those people don't fucking agree with each other either no, I mean, my favorite thing is, even if you think you agree with each other, you get a group of marxist leninists and a group of trotskyists and a group of uh of the three or four major types of maoism together and then you ask them a question on any uh domestic or geopolitical um problem and actually there'll be like half of the trots agree with the weird maoist but they hate them. Those trots and maoice hate each other for historical reasons but they actually agree about domestic politics today and then that's also true. It's like half of the like, half of the like reformist, part of the DSA and half of the Marxist Leninist are both really duggist and you're just like but they hate each other because of the names. It's just kind of funny.
Matt McManus :Oh yeah, I got involved in that myself a little bit, um, so I'm in dsa, right, I make no bones about that. Um, ecumenically, I'm in dsa. Let's just put it that way, right?
Matt McManus :but you know I remember there's that big debate about whether um aoc was taking a hard line enough, uh, on israel, palestine. And so new york dsi still endorsed her, but the national dsa was a little more wary about it because they were very influenced by. It was like the Marxist unity group in DSA and I said I think getting rid of her is a bad idea because I think she's a good vehicle for encouraging people to be more interested in socialism and, quite frankly, dsa needs her a lot more than she needs it at this point. And boy oh boy did I get a lot of angry people messaging me being like how dare you don't draw a line at this point.
Matt McManus :You know, I think I fired back like look for the average American who's not really online and doesn't have, you know, a copy of State and Revolution, you know, under their pillow, saying you are like AOC is not left wing enough for you, is giant red flag, right. So I don't know what else. I don't want to kind of relitigate that right, but all that's to say, right. That really did expose me once more to the fact that, look, even if we were to form like a democratic socialist party, the idea that that would overcome any disunity amongst us, I think is a bit of a pipe dream.
C. Derick Varn:No, I mean, look the antagonist, the agonistics, uh to, to use moose term uh does not just exist between us, and the right it does, and I will always exist with it, between us and each other, and I actually I mean here's one other thing. I actually think that that is somewhat healthy. There are times, however, to draw a united front, and I use that term advisedly, um, as a proper sectarian, um, uh. And there's a time, not you know, not to, and right now I'm like, well, um, I'm not sure you know, I'm not on team popular front right now. I'm like, well, I'm not sure I'm not on team Popular Front right now, but things are pretty bad and maybe we should hash this shit out at a different time.
Matt McManus :I agree with you. Look, I think that debate on the left is healthy. I actually think it's going to be a sign of intellectual dynamism. Right when there's this broad conformity or unanimity on most issues, it really means that your movement is dead rather than vital right. What Alistair McIntyre say in After Virtue right, as soon as a political tradition becomes Berkey, and it's already virtue right. As soon as a political tradition becomes Berkey and it's already dead. Right, there's no real point in trying to resuscitate it. On the other hand, to your point, healthy disagreement is one thing. I am not going to cooperate with you. To get the lifeboat down while the Titanic is sinking is not a healthy kind of disagreement. Right At that point it's like well, we can all fucking go down together then, I guess, and nothing will be accomplished. So I really don't know what the solution is for the American left. Quite frankly, I know that I have my own political program of what I'd like to see realized. I do think that there are reasons to be somewhat optimistic about what's occurring, and then I just maybe I'll end with this I think that one thing that is a positive sign for me if I was looking for it and right now I'm quite pessimistic about things. I want to be clear.
Matt McManus :Right is the fact that a lot of people are very concerned about the impact that Trump is going to have on the broader world. Presidency has really demonstrated the extent to which America's power and geopolitical influence has shrunk quite dramatically. Right, and you see this all over the place, right? Canada, which many people expected was just going to roll over when Trump threatened with terrorists, basically gave the United States the finger and said well, if we have to take economic contractions and recessions year in and year out to not have to put up with you anymore, then so be it. Right, and right now, those kinds of attitudes are pulling at 60, 70, 80% support in the country and they go up day in and day out. Or look at Europe. Right, that was even more dramatic when Trump basically made it very clear that he wanted the war in Ukraine to end and he wanted the Ukrainians to surrender. Every European states said basically fine, if that's your attitude, we will rearm and we will arm the Ukrainians.
Matt McManus :Right Now, I'm not taking sides in that particular conflict, right, but 10 years ago, the idea that European states aligned with the United States would decide that they're going to approve effectively an independent foreign policy and just be indifferent to what an American president wants would be, again, unthinkable, right?
Matt McManus :So if you look at things that way, what's very clear, to me at least, is that America's geopolitical centrality in the world is shrinking alongside let's be blunt its moral character with this particular government in office, right, and I expect that it's probably going to only increase as time goes along. It's going to create an awful lot of problems. So that does create some opportunities to militate against things like the Washington consensus, american imperialism, and to try to think about different ways to recalibrate geopolitics and potentially more cosmopolitan socialist direction, although how to go about doing that I'm really not sure at this point well, I, I do think the american left um, uh, and and this I, I know that there's some people who are going to disagree with me, but doubling down on nationalism right now would be a particularly stupid move.
C. Derick Varn:I mean, for us, um uh one, uh, we already live in a multipolar world. We're going to see what that means. It means it. One of the things it means is political alliances are much more unstable. Um uh to um. I don't know that I feel great about germany, uh, rearming again. But if, if I will say this it's bad. Not just that germany was willing to to germ to. Germany and France are willing to forego American leadership for the first time since World War Two, but they're willing to take on debt to do it. Yeah well, that's unheard of.
Matt McManus :I mean, and that's a real testament to just how concerned they are. I mean, there's not been a European leader yet that's been expressly rude to Donald Trump. But if you think about that gesture, right, we are willing to go into debt just to not have to be dependent on you any longer and to do whatever the fuck we want without having to answer to you. It's a real sign of the fact that they seem to have come to the conclusion that Trump is not just some aberration that the Americans went through for four years. It seems like this is something that's got to work out of its system, which means America is going to be an unreliable ally and probably involved, shall we say, in its own issues. So they're just going to back away from all that and do their own thing. And again, like you said, kind of unprecedented. I never would have thought that would happen.
C. Derick Varn:Right, you know. I also want to be clear. Like you said, kind of unprecedented. I never would have thought that would happen. Right, you know? Um, I also want to be clear I'm not, uh, I'm not happy with either the american or the european stance towards the russia ukraine war, but, um, it is interesting that that's where this leads. In some ways, I will also admit that is part of trump's foreign policy to have Europe rearm itself and do its own security. Trump has said so, but there's other things that he doesn't seem to have realized that that would lead to. Maybe he doesn't care, I don't know. I tend to view Trump as what I like to call lizard brain intelligent, which means he's not playing three dimensional chess or four dimensional chess, he's playing checkers. But God damn it, can you win at checkers sometimes?
Matt McManus :Oh, absolutely. I think that people seriously underestimated the skill set that he does have, and I've said that for a long time. Right, like he is a brilliant marketer. Right that he does have, and I've said that for a long time. Right, like he is a brilliant marketer. Right, I mean my friends and I I mean a lot of leftists, I know love his fucking tweets. Right, I mean little Marco crooked Hillary. These are like iconic bits of American Americana at this point that are going to echo down through history. Right, and he's got a talent right.
Matt McManus :But to your point about not playing chess, I don't think what a lot of people realized is, yes, america had to essentially subsidize European security, right, while the Europeans built great big welfare states. But they got an enormous amount from that. Not least was the ability to all but dictate European foreign policy and, in many cases, domestic policy, because what else were the Europeans going to do about it? Right, a more militarized Europe, almost by definition, is going to be a much more independent Europe. That is going to feel very free to tell the American president in the future you can go fuck off right now, please, and au revoir at that right.
C. Derick Varn:Although the other thing I will say is, this cuts in a lot of directions, because I also think European power is winning too. But relative in the world, sure, yeah, yeah, I think we just have a world where there's a lot more major players, sure, sure, and we're going to have to deal with that.
C. Derick Varn:And we haven't even talked about China right, yeah, we haven't even dealt with China. Um, and we haven't talked about china, right, yeah, we haven't dealt with china. Um, one of the things I would say that if I was going to give advance to either liberal or just regular old leftist, um, north american solidarity would be important right now. Um, I really do believe that, like we need to have solidarity with mexico and canada. I know my Canadian friends might be surprised, given how much slack I give them, but, as I told you off air, I like to make weird American nationalist jokes to pick off, to piss off Canadian nationalists, because I know the only like real identity that a lot of non French speaking Canadian nationalists have is that they're not Americans and they're thus morally superior to us.
Matt McManus :And healthcare. Don't forget that.
C. Derick Varn:And they have healthcare, although they're underfunded in certain provinces, without a doubt, but at this moment, I do think we need to have solidarity with our North American brethren. There are better ways to integrate people into a polity than to threaten to turn them into Puerto Rico or one state. I mean, as you and I said, it's one of the few things that could actually unite Canadians.
Matt McManus :Yeah.
Matt McManus :I'm not going to lie. I have seen very, very conservative friends that I grew up with right in small town Ontario, the kind of people that were like fuck it. And you know what are all these people wearing dresses around here? For I think these are dudes, aren't they? You know that kind of thing, who are like the most anti-MAGA types in the world right now. Right, won't buy American whiskey, won't listen to American music, just won't have nothing to do with the United States. And I've also seen American conservatives get really surprised and perplexed by it, and it kind of pisses me off because I'm like you do realize that it is a different country and that Canadian nationalism, when confronted by an overwhelming and potentially aggressive American nationalism, is almost certainly going to become anti-American right, and you know, consequently, a couple of people who are kind of maple maga types are now almost always called quizlings. I've even seen that word thrown around by the Canadian media, right, and it's like what a weird time to be alive.
C. Derick Varn:It is strange and, like we said, it seems to have saved the Liberal Party in Canada's political prospects for the time being.
Matt McManus :That and being absolutely ruthless, right. I mean, I don't think people understand the Liberal Party in Canada all that well. There's a reason. It's been in power pretty much unendingly for more than a century now. The minute they realized that JT uh was going south, they were like all right, knives out, gone. All right, next guy yeah, they'll do that.
C. Derick Varn:I mean, uh, I I think it's it's. It's interesting, um, as far as it goes, where we're going to be. Um, uh, it's going to be interesting where the european conservatives go. I will say this I was shocked at some of the French conservatives response to to Trump. Like, I think one of the one of the the center right Basically called him a traitor. I can't remember who exactly said it, but it was not. It wasn't a Le Pen type, but it was a influential, influential kind of right-ish, of center right politician and I was like, okay, this is, this has gone in a different way than expected.
Matt McManus :And even Nigel Farage, right Uh, is increasingly trying to distance himself, and he was the kind of person with brown nose with Trump. Any chance he got back at the time?
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, yeah, I know it, it is interesting. Um, uh, it might also give, uh, the, the labor party in the uk, a few more months in power, um, uh. So anyway, um, I I do think that's for me. This is an interesting place for leftists to be, to kind of parse where they are and where they aren't, because I think one of the problems that we're going to see and this will be my last comment and then we can wrap this up is that we need to understand our history better, to understand where we're going and what we see right now amongst the left, whatever that is and I do, I say that sometimes sarcastically, but right now I really don't know, because I can find a leftist, a leftist group that has any position, including positions to the right of rightist groups, and I think right now would be a time to kind of figure out where you really are and to maybe quit LARPing.
C. Derick Varn:And the thing is about doing politics is that you actually have to do politics, not just post about it or even go to protests, like politics requires you to engage in civic and civil society in a way that's beyond posting postings. I'm not saying posting is unimportant. I'm not saying the internet isn't the real world, even because it's part of the real world. People, if you're still saying that, you're delusional.
Matt McManus :Yeah, by 2025,. If you think the internet doesn't have a difference, then I don't know what to fucking say to you.
C. Derick Varn:Right, but I also do think so does real lurk and mortar politics. That does still matter and that mattered for Trump, because I guarantee you posting isn't what's scaring the GOP into being quiet. What Trump seems to accidentally or intentionally, I don't know perhaps engineer a recession so yeah, I mean that could be fine.
Matt McManus :I mean, as a fellow millennial right, I sat there. I've been like I'm fucking emotionally ready for another one baby, bring it on right. I'll just fucking sit there and sell my kidney and keep on rolling. But for my last comment I think I'm just going to say this my friend Ben likes to quote Freddie DeBoer a lot and I have seen this over the years and I think it is an insightful piece of wisdom, and what DeBoer used to say is one of the reasons that the left is in a pickle is because wisdom and what DeBoer used to say is one of the reasons that the left is in a pickle is because many people on the left will say if you disagree with me about one thing, then I can't have anything to do with you, because you've adopted a kind of a moral stance.
Matt McManus :And many people on the right will say if you agree with us about one thing, you're already most of the way there.
Matt McManus :So let's just have a couple of conversations and we'll see if we can push you all the way there.
Matt McManus :Right now that's something of a caricature, but I've seen that often enough to know that it does align with something real Right, and I think what the left needs to do provisionally going forward is focus, yes, on what we all are going to be ideologically committed to, but also recognize that we need to convince people that aren't already on our team that we are offering them something better than what is available right now, and I think that this is actually, interestingly enough, a good time to make that pitch, because a lot of people, like you point out, are really pissed off at the Democratic Party and very, very pissed off at what Trump is doing. So there's an opening there, right, and, rather than kind of adopt this puritanical mindset of you, need to get on board with the right principles and the right attitudes right away. Let's just try talking to people to your point about doing politics, see how much they're willing to take on board, stay in contact with them, and then things will play themselves out.
C. Derick Varn:You don't know how far people are willing to go once you talk to them either, and I think that's awesome. We've been surprised with that with a lot of former left liberals who are now, you know, to the right of Cheney.
Matt McManus :But I mean, I have a buddy who's a neoliberal economist, or was a neoliberal economist Right the Trump era, and a couple of conversations with him, and he now said you know, I'm an adornal person Right that he's actually right about things and I've become very anti-capitalist. So it can go the other way. I don't think people appreciate that.
C. Derick Varn:I think my last thought is I don't want socialists to adopt the position of some resistance liberals in America who are like we will not accept any former MAGA people, and I'm like that's fucking stupid. Yeah, if people come and ask to want to join you to fight your enemy, and they're willing to talk to you and hear you out in a way that they were never willing to do before, you don't go. Well, you. You, you came over, but too late, so fuck you. And I also don't trust you. You're still a bigot and I'm like. I'm like how do you unmake bigots if you just assume that once you've been a bigot you'll be a bigot for your entire fucking life? Like that's dumb, what? It's not my experience with people either so no, no, no.
Matt McManus :We need to create spaces for people to come on board right now. Don't be wrong. That doesn't mean we should start sitting there and being like.
C. Derick Varn:We just need to understand nazis right, you know, let's just dialogue with them and be compassionate. Give dick cheney. No, I'm not saying that either.
Matt McManus :No exactly, there are limitations to any kind of principle. But you know tom dick or joe who voted for donald trump because they were, they didn't like woke culture, because they heard something bad about it and they're also just unhappy with inflation.
C. Derick Varn:Absolutely, these are people that you can talk to and try to get on board right, um, and I I would say you can do that without trying to tail the right too, because the other thing you and I both complain a lot about is leftists are like well, if we just acted more like the right, we'd win. And I want to point out in europe a bunch of parties have tried that in the last rounds, the last three years of election. All of them have done worse than predicted in germany and britain, etc. Because people don't trust them on either side.
Matt McManus :Yeah, oh, totally right. It turns out that if you have a choice between voting for the right and voting for a leftist pretending to be on the right, a lot of people will just decide to fucking up for the real thing. What a thought, right?
C. Derick Varn:yeah, why drink new coke? Um, so you know that. Yeah, that doesn't mean you don't talk to to right like I have a lot of conservative friends I think people should know that about. But but the other thing about you and I is, uh, you know, I mean you do a can Canadian conservatives mostly, which is a very specific kind of person, and I deal with red staters, but I've talked to tons of- it's a bit easier now, especially over the last couple of months, because a lot of them have been like you know what I hate MAGA too.
Matt McManus :It's like well, kind of like you were saying, well, get on board, mate. The water's warm step in the tub.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, red Tory, if you just drop the Tory you're there. No, but anyway, thank you so much, matt. Where can people find your work?
Matt McManus :Sure, you can find me writing on things like Jacobin Christian socialism, current affairs, commonwealth, and if you want, just send me an email, mattmcmanister, under the gmailcom. I do my.
