Liberalism At The Brink with Dillion From Untrodden Podcast

Politics feels louder than ever and somehow emptier too. We open the hood on liberalism—what it claims to be, how it actually behaves, and why Trump’s rise didn’t just bend norms but exposed tensions baked into the system. With Dillion from Untrodden, we trace the fault lines between liberal commitments to stability and civil discourse and the gravitational pull toward executive power, media spectacle, and anti‑politics.

Step by step, we chart the historical map: from the 18th Brumaire and Bonapartism to today’s illiberal temptations, and why figures like Orban or Berlusconi echo past crises more than they break from them. We ask whether liberalism’s best asset—pragmatic governance—can survive without a clearer core, and whether the left’s sharpest critiques can help rebuild a coherent center of gravity rather than just tear it down. We also examine identity politics’ moral heat with little policy light, the post‑pandemic sorting of temperaments over ideologies, and the unsettling ease with which tech billionaires switch lanes as incentives shift.

Rather than rehearse stale talking points, we get practical about coalitions. What can Marxists and liberals realistically build together? Where do alliance models like the united front make sense, and where do they fail? We argue for a new baseline: mutual recognition, radical honesty, and a shared willingness to protect civil society and institutional checks as nonnegotiables. From unions to city budgets, the places where people shoulder common obligations are where trust can be rebuilt and rhetoric can give way to results.

If you’re tired of vibes posing as politics and want a serious, good‑faith reckoning with liberalism’s crisis and the left’s role in solving it, this conversation is for you. Listen, share with a friend who disagrees with you, and tell us: what principle would you refuse to compromise in any coalition? Subscribe and leave a review to keep these cross‑currents alive.

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

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SPEAKER_01 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmog. And today I'm with Dylan from the Untrodden Podcast, a podcast that specializes in uh liberal engagement with left-wing philosophy. Um although as when I say any of this kind of thing, we have to realize that every term, liberal engagement, left-wing and philosophy are all contested words. Yeah. And in that spirit, Dylan, um, I'm gonna ask you what interested you as a person interested in liberal philosophy and political science, um to engage with left-wing critics of

Setting The Table: Liberalism And The Left

SPEAKER_01 1:35

liberalism and left-wing critics of the left?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Yeah, well, uh, I mean, uh, the defining moment for me was definitely the victory of Trump. Um, and you know, for me, I think the reason that was very confusing to me because I felt like I had these, you know, very strong liberal principles. And it seemed to me like none of the kind of discussion or the awareness of that election was based on those principles. You know, it was all about um strategy, um, kind of you know, various transitory interests of like the Democratic Party strategy. Like, do we need to have different podcasts or all this stuff that I just don't care about at all? Um, or it was, you know, just like the like the doom saying, or people switching teams, like all of a sudden all the billionaires are big Trump fans, I I guess they've been big Trump fans apparently for a very long time, the biggest Trump fans. And so the the whole thing, I just I just felt like the whole dialogue was just very confusing to me. And uh I felt like Donald Trump was a substantive, severe threat to liberalism as kind of a system itself. Um, and obviously liberalism should have like disagreement within it, but to me it seemed like, and I can go into this at some point if you want, but to me, it seemed like this was a substantively different threat, and so I didn't have answers to what was going on. And I felt like I had to, I don't know, learn more, uh, put myself out there, listen to different types of thought. And at the time I had already had some, I just kind of happened by coincidence to kind of find some dissident, like leftist type online figures, and so I decided to actually listen to more uh, you know, people like Daniel Tutt, um, Chris Katrone, actually start listening to some Marxist academic online figures. And I just realized there was this whole world that I didn't understand. And, you know, I I have I had views on leftism for a long time, and a lot of those views have remained

Trump As Catalyst For Reassessment

SPEAKER_00 3:27

the same about those particular kinds of leftists, but what I didn't realize was that the theoretical, more serious like area of the left had something that I had to listen to that I was interested in. And particularly I felt like the 18th Premier um by Marx was a text which revealed uh so much like sort of similar similarity to the situation where we're in now, where I had to ask myself, is this because there's something about the leftist critiques that I'm hearing that has value? And so um, yeah, that kind of opened that question up directly for me. And and I really wanted to start to like open dialogue with those people that were influencing me and really work through this, these kind of these questions I was asking myself.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Um, that makes sense. I mean, I guess my my question to that though so it's the second election of Donald Trump that is your crisis, not the first. Uh so I guess that's that's age. Um as we discussed on um on your show, I'm like significantly other than older than you. And I would like to kind of discuss what you think liberalism as a system is, because I think one of the things about the crisis of liberalism uh since Obama actually, or since the end of the Bush administration, um there has been a lot of talk about a crisis of liberalism from both the far left, the center left, even by the end of the Obama administration, and the far and center center far right. Um and and my understanding and my experience of this, um Bush represented a crisis for liberalism in their GOP,

Defining Liberalism’s Core Commitments

SPEAKER_01 5:32

and Obama's failure to have a successor that could transcend Trump won, as well as um the left turning further and further away from a detente with the Democratic Party that had existed une uneasily uh for a long time, um, at least in rhetoric. Although to complicate that a little bit more, the there were actually more left-wing third parties in the 1990s and 1980s than there are you know post-Obama. Um I mean, uh the Green Party, the Green Party um has never gotten the share of the vote that it got when Nader was leading it in the 90s, um since then. Um and the the and even and even before uh George W. Bush, George Herbert Rocker Bush was seen as a crisis of of liber of liberal conservatism because Ross Perot had split the vote and led to Clinton's victory in 1992. Um but none of those like freak people out the way Trump did. And if you look at like you start looking at both left and right-wing Trump, you start seeing these critiques of liberalism even making it into the New York Times. So in addition to someone like David Brooks, you had Ross Dunhat, who was kind of the light version of someone like Patrick Vanin. Um, and if you don't know who Patrick Denine is, he's one of these, you know, crisis of liberalism people that if you don't see what his answer is, it seems like he's almost a left-winger.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Um, and then you read the last three chapters of his book on the subject and you realize, no, no, he's a he's a integralist and a rightist. Um I ask you this because uh I think this this was missed by um a lot of liberals. I think a lot of liberals maybe even understand Front better as an individual figure than those of us who follow the long deray terms of liberalism do. I might even that we've talked about that off air, and I might even give you that point. Um but I I don't think that there's been a deep understanding of the internal crisis of ideology amongst younger liberals. Um, and uh I I guess this leads me to ask you one, do you think liberalism is in crisis? And two, what do you think liberalism is to be in crisis in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Right. Yeah, I mean, before uh before I address those directly, I would just say that I I both agree with you and disagree with you. Uh I completely agree with you that liberals haven't grappled with this question when it should have been at least beginning to be grappled with, that we've just been kind of living in blissful ignorance and you know, kind of um just yeah, very, very behind the times, um, unaware. And I think that's a big problem. And that that's kind of exactly the problem I was pointing out about liberals that made me interested in leftist critique, is is that I just felt like they still weren't assessing the situation properly, really. Um, and then but where I would disagree with you is I I do think there's something substantively different about Trump. I I do think there's something different about the moment we're in now. Um, I actually don't think that my feeling about this happening with Trump too is as much to do with age as it is to do with a substantive difference in the kind of character that Trump was in Trump 2 um or had shown himself to be. And so yeah, I think that's the case. Uh, we can get more into that, but just to address your questions, I mean, is there a crisis? I would say I guess I have to be kind of evasive about that. On one hand, clearly there is a crisis, clearly. I mean, there's complete incoherence, uh, disarray. Uh, I think we're in a moment where liberalism is really the system is really up for grabs in a way that it hasn't been in maybe a hundred years. Um, you know, uh in the sense that people are really disaffected and don't believe in liberalism anymore. I mean, it's really hard to find a it's it's getting harder and harder to find people who are just like, yeah, I just like liberals and I like capitalism. It's it's hard to find those people and it's gonna become even harder. And people all on all sorts of the spectrum are are really rediscovering themselves and starting from scratch and rediscovering that politics can be more than what we've just kind of assumed and taken for granted. So on that level, there there must be a crisis. Um I guess where I would say that there isn't a crisis as much is I think we put liberalism in a position that's kind of untenable where we expect it to be coherent or philosophically sound or something like that. When the reality is that no government has ever made sense, right? I mean, no government has ever fulfilled its philosophical tenets. Um it's always kind of grappling with different incoherent strands. I mean, if we look at like medieval Europe, for example, right? You have a very real Christian character, a Christian core, a grappling with that Christian character, and also a whole lot of not grappling with that and very confused uh relations. And so on that level, what do I think liberalism is? Well, uh, first of all, liberalism is a complicated tradition, it has different strands within it. It has to, every tradition is that way. Um, but generally, I think liberalism is really defined by an anti-authoritarian character, um, and an kind of an anti-violence, kind of moderate character, pro-civil discourse, um, and some level of democracy, um, but it not complete democracy almost ever. I mean, pretty much every liberal is against democracy, it pure democracy. I mean, that's just that's just a fact, right? Um, so we're talking about a tradition of republicanism and you know, things like this, which are really trying to find a sweet spot between all these different factors, right? We really need to have democratic input, but not too much. Um, we need to have stability uh to prevent violence. I see it as very practical in that way. Um if you look at like America particularly, the founding fathers, they don't they don't really they do have a side of them which is very much like partisan, radical democracy believers. Um, but at the same time, they're very much trying to solve the problem of the state in history. They're trying to figure out how can we make a state that isn't going to kill itself, right? I mean, they really are. Their belief is that the reason to have all these different institutions is not necessarily to have liberty, it's to have stability. And and the thought is that the liberty which they cared about so much would come from the stability, but the priority has to be the stability, right? And I mean, this comes back to Trump. Um, because for me, what I like about liberalism is that is that realistic stability and good governance. Um, I think that's the best thing you can expect from it. The best thing liberal has liberalism has going for it is good governance, um, stability, uh, responsiveness to change, although at you know very very low varying degrees. And Trump is an anti-liberal in

Historical Crises And Echoes Today

SPEAKER_00 12:52

that sense. He doesn't he doesn't believe in the system. Um, he's he's proclaimed himself to be outside of the system. I I think he's pretty much anti-constitution, um, in the sense that I think you you have to have like a fair election system. That's and it's not just like a it's not just like some like I don't know, zealous democracy ideal. It's it's because, like I said, the system is built in such a way that the different aspects of government have to kind of collide with each other. And one of the ways which the Federalist papers literally discuss doing this is the vote. And the the vote has to be a check, and the vote can't be controlled by a branch of government because the branch of government will just do whatever it wants with it, of course. And I think Trump basically tried to do a unilateral executive um control over the vote. I think he basically did that, and I think that's that's anti-liberal. I think that that that degrades into you know some kind of authoritarian system, some kind of anti-liberal system. And I think when you have figures like Trump or Orbon who have shown that they don't really care about the parliament or the clashing of institutions and civil society also, um, that seems anti-liberal to me. And so yeah, I mean it is kind of vague and nebulous in some way, but this appreciation for civil society, for institutions, uh, this is really the core of the liberal tradition. It I mean, it really seems to me to be the coherent strand. Um, but that will but that that is gonna have a lot of variants. I mean, you're gonna go all the way from hardcore federalist liberals types who are very much on the edge of that authoritarianism, right? I mean, they're they're gonna be really close, they're gonna be up, they're gonna be up there, and they're gonna be like, we need to do some things that are against your civil rights uh for the public good, and they're gonna be really veering on the edge of that. On the other edge, you're gonna have confederates, right? And you're gonna have people who are like, I'm so I want my rights so bad that I should be able to do whatever I want, and we should have no government, and I should just, you know, we should just do whatever we want. Uh kind of libertarianism, proto-libertarianism. And I think those are both legitimate strands of the liberal tradition, those are the two ends of it, and I think it might be useful to start with defining it as those two ends.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Um yeah, yeah, I mean, Jonathan Israel, the the I consider kind of the premium imminent scholar of the historical tradition of liberalism, uh defines three broad categories of which Marxism is a deviation out of. Like we we come out uh so we might call it left liberalism, um, and I don't mean like what we call what Marxists will call rad lib or shit lib. I mean um I mean the the almost complete democratic form of liberalism that wanted uh it called for mediating institutions, but not many. Um the inrajays and the French Revolution, um, and for those of you don't know your French Revolution categories, that's not the Jacobins, that's people to the left of them. Um the the early uh socialists, including the San Simonians, um, the pre-Marxist socialist, uh the uh the kind of American individualist, both anarchist and not, and that is gonna range from the transcendentalist to Les Ander Spooner, the American anarchist, um, they all kind of come out of liberalism. Um and and and things that make people uncomfortable uh is that um there are some forms of authoritarianism, including fascism, that have a clear relationship to liberalism. One of the things that makes talking about this hard with someone like Trump and about our difference, you keep on, I mean we we've gone back and forth on this, where I think you you keep on impugning that I think Trump is the same thing as like most right-wing figures. And I think Trump is the ultimate combination of contradictions in right liberalism that have existed for a while, and the reason why I think that is Trump is not unique as a quasi-Caesarist or Bonapartist figure as a response to liberalism right now. Um I'm gonna leave China out of it because that's a more complicated scenario, and in some ways, I think they're just not coming out of this tradition at all. Um except for that there's some liberalism as a background of Chinese communism, but but not a lot. Um, but let's we can talk about um Orban, Bellascone, uh, in some ways, ironically, Macron, although he's different in that he's almost a Caesarist figure for the preservation of liberalism.

SPEAKER_02 17:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Um so he's an ill he really is in in my mind an ill liberal liberal. Um uh and this tendency towards uh increased executive authority, which is most pronounced in the US, but is again not unique to it. Um we have had quasi-Trumpist figures emerge in England, we have had quasi-trumpist figures emerge in all the major European economies and in East Asia. You know, and it's even kind of wrong-headed to call them quasi-Trumpists because some of them come as much as a decade earlier than Trump. Um, so to me, that indicates that there is something going on in this spectrum of liberalism where it no longer can cohere itself, and and this has happened before, and the time it's happened before, in my mind is World War II. Um, that you saw the the the the final defeat of the old aristocratic enciant regimes. Uh, I know Marxists like to pretend that they went out during those the national revolutions, but if you actually look at the stats, they weren't completely decimated until the end of World War I. Um and you had a crisis in liberalism economically, and you had a weird hybrid force emerge. Um the various fascisms, and I actually use plural there on purpose because there's the like the similarities between Italian fascism, Romanian fascism, um, and Nazism are they're they're partial. Nazism's the weirdest of them. Um but and there was an attraction by strong, I mean, we we we do have to admit uh that before the late 1930s, a lot of progressive liberals in America kind of liked not uh not Nazism, fascism. They did not like Nazism, but they were a little bit more sanguine on Mussolini. Um and I think that's because there was a similar problem, but in that case it was purely economic. Today it's economic in something else. And I can't I I actually don't feel comfortable putting down what that something else is. I mean, I would say we have a crisis in social reproduction, and I think that crisis is related to economics, but it's deeper than that. And let me talk about how I would define that. Like, like kids today aren't dating, they don't really want to have a family. There's uh the the belief in a future at all amongst the generation slightly younger than I think you are, is very, very low. Um, it's like world historically low. It's like 50% of people in their in their late teens don't even really think there's a future to be had. Um, that might be slightly exaggerated. It's not true worldwide, but it's very much true in the English speaking world. And I I my question is then why have so many people seen Trumpism with its I mean, one of the things I think you're dead on about that makes Trumpism illiberal is if we go back to like Max Weber's definition of liberalism, and I think our discussion is going to jump around today on different definitions of liberalism, right? But civil society is a counterbalance to the state because the state is for Max Weber

Executive Power, Institutions, And Anti‑Liberal Drift

SPEAKER_01 21:42

a monopoly on violence that you accept for the purposes of stability because that stability will allow you to have other forms of civil liberty, right? Um, and that if that monopoly on violence starts to break down or becomes too direct, you're gonna have a legitimacy crisis. Um, so I mean, I hate to sound like there's a Goldilocks theory of violence in liberalism, but there kind of is in the early 20th century. Um, you know, we want to sublimate the violence of the state, make it you know, rein it in by rules of law, maintain uh allow people to have their freedom and social competition, but keep it from going into outright civil war because of the experience of the early 20th century and the 19th century, where civil wars were super common. Um I guess my question to you is even in the earlier crises of liberalism in the early in the early 20th century and in the middle of the 19th century, um there very much seemed like a way out. Um but there are also very clear alternatives on the table. And the in the 19th century it's it's the oh it's the Anjian regimes. Um in the early 20th century it's fascism and communism. Um today these these these alternatives to liberalism aren't coming from outside competitor ideologies, they're just not. Like like Trump isn't someone who became like this because he be he became one over to a to an anti-liberal um uh you know competing ideology of another state. Uh maybe people argue that with Russia, but you know, but I don't I don't see the evidence of it. He seems to be where a certain kind of economic protectionism that can drill I I don't want to call him a populist because I don't actually think he is, I think that's actually a misunderstanding. Um can can can push himself into the public as a demagogue for all these conflicting tendencies, but then really do it for I mean I one thing I agree with you is there is a substantive difference between Trump run and twant two, and where a lot of us like Danny Bessner, um definitely Chris Catron, myself, um were perhaps too soft is we assumed that while there might be a difference between Trump two and Trump one, it would not be as thick as it obviously was. Now that some of those people are still maintaining that uh for me, within the first week I knew I was wrong that we were not going back to Trump one, that the countervailing institutions of uh uh of governmental liberalism that kept him in check have been weakened somehow. Um but the question is, how did they get weakened when the Democratic Party was in charge after Trump? I mean, these these are like I guess this is both a philosophical question and a practical question for you, as far as your opinion on it. Like, what why is someone like Trump more feasible now? Because I I couldn't imagine him, even in the like in the worst of the of the Bush years, and we'll admit that like uh George W. Bush era uh Patriot Act powers are what is enabling Trump mixed with some old powers given to FDR actually to do what he's doing now. Um in some more that there's any legal pretense for it, of which there's not a ton. I mean, there's some ways in which this this government is by its own standards somewhat lawless.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Um yeah, I mean I I would say a few things. So I think one, I do think it's a legitimate problem that I have to take up, and it's why I was so interested in the 18th premiere and leftism broadly, really, is this question of how is Trump possible and what what is this tendency in liberalism? Because I do think I would actually say not only is Trump kind of reflective of a deeper problem um at the same time, uh this this is a very old problem. I mean, just earlier I was reading um Samuel Johnson and Hume um from like mid-18th century England, and they both commented on Robert uh Wolpole, who was like, you know, big uh Whig liberal quote unquote guy who was very controversial because he very much did, my understanding is he consolidated the state in a lot of ways. He was pretty controversial, he was a little corrupt, and so he was this kind of figure. And you know, what's interesting is that Samuel Johnson is maybe a more progressive type liberal, and Hume is what I would consider to be a very conservative liberal. I think they're both liberals. They both kind of oppose him because this tension that we're talking about right now between this kind of you know, the this authority and this desire to get things done, and this this feeling of just ultra liberty in contrast to that, these like two polls. I mean, these were contesting each other blatantly, I mean, hundreds of years ago in England. I mean, this is a very real tension that that liberalism has never really like resolved or solved or something. I mean, this is a real thing that we have to deal with. And I I think um the American system, I guess, is is vulnerable to that. Um, and it has been vulnerable to that. I mean, you all you have to do is look at you know the Civil War to see a time when the American system was completely shifting. And I would say the Civil War is really the Federalists winning. Um, it's I because I I think some people will say that the way that the country changed in the Civil War made it fundamentally different, like it was anti-constitutional. And I would say there was two sides, and ironically or not ironically at all, there was this hardcoil liberty faction, and there was this federalist faction, and though their differences were never resolved. I mean, they had to kind of they they met in the middle with you know the the Bill of Rights, and they met in the middle, and ultimately with the Civil War is one of those factions getting a win, a really big win, and consolidating more towards the federalist angle. And so, in that sense, is a long time coming. I mean, ever since we can trace it all the way back to the Civil War, that there's a that there's really that opposition

Coalitions, Realignment, And Media Ecosystems

SPEAKER_00 28:14

between a discontent who and a lot of people will trace Trumpism back to the Confederacy and they'll do it on kind of like a racial politics angle or whatever, but I do think it's legitimate in the sense that there's this radical, uh liberal, libertarian belief that the state needs to uh get out of my country and I need to have local politicians or whatever, and that's a very contradictory belief um itself against this winning, triumphing federalism that you can see obviously in FDR, like you said. And so, in that sense, I think Trump is I think you are right to point out that Trump isn't that crazy when looking at it from that perspective. And I I don't really have an answer for that. That's kind of my main problem. My only answer would be that I think it needs this problem needs to be dealt with honestly, and we need to be honest that when we're looking at those two liberal strains, I kind of have my preference. Um, but ultimately they're both legitimate, which also means they're both illegitimate. Uh, that that neither neither one of them really has a claim to the true liberalism. Liberalism is kind of incoherent, and we need a genuine philosophical grappling with with what liberalism is, what it ought to be. And I think that's what the moment really requires, is honestly a full philosophical, um, you know, thoughtful undertaking of what we're at we're doing. I I think people have essentially the the one faction one over the other, and the two factions kind of existed uh in in discontent and in frustrated coexistence. And I think it's kind of a naive liberal lack of historical appreciation that we never dealt with these problems. Um and and so I think it's really a long time coming, kind of an inevitable, uh pro inevitable crisis. And that's what I would really say. It's an inevitable crisis that these these factions are going to come to fight each other. It's inevitable in any system, any any government in history, human history has had to deal with these things. And so what we what we need is yeah, we need to reckon with what liberalism is. I have some ideas of what I think is good about liberalism, and we also need to reckon with the critiques of liberalism, and that's why, again, why I'm here, why I'm talking to leftists, is you know, I think we have to deal with that. And unfortunately, I think the problem with our political situation is it's kind of anti it's kind of pre political, it's kind of anti political, and you're kind of hinting at that when you talk about how younger generations are just kind of hopeless. There isn't a lot of genuine grappling with these problems, there just isn't, right? I mean, you have people who are like coping and want to just hold on to the dream for as long as possible, the Democrats. Um, you've got people Who have kind of like incoherent ideas about how to demolish liberalism. You've got Trump who I think has mostly personal interests. I don't think he's ideal ideological at all. Of course, yeah, I agree with you. And but there are ideological people around Trump who want to take advantage of the moment and go in a completely different direction. And so I guess my doomer, my doom, my doomer take would be that things are really so deeply incoherent that the only path forward has to be kind of an honest acknowledgement of that, um, rather than just kind of like take putting your partisan flag in like a particular faction in that incoherence, rather saying this is all incoherent. What does make sense? What can we figure out? And and that I think that's gonna have to make strange alliances. I think people who haven't worked together before are gonna have to see eye to eye, and they're gonna have to forge alliances on different grounds. And I don't think people are in any respect ready to do that, but we really have to move past the new left and uh the progressives and the the neocons and the neoliberals and all these factions, we really have to move past them and grapple with what the moment we're in.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Uh, one of the things about that, I I here's one of the things that I would agree with you. If you looked at MSNBC, uh, I'm gonna take that as like the standard bearer of left liberalism, even though it's not even MSNBC. What is it, MS Now?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Um I think so. Yeah, I don't even know.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Yeah, yeah, and um it was while there were a few Jacobin adjacent democratic socialists who are who smell of Marxism, kind of um, yeah, uh, who can get on there? Uh Marxists are still not generally on there. If the the the liberal the left liberal source where you will occasionally find Marxists, um is gonna be Pacifica Radio and maybe Democracy Now, and that's very rare, even there. Um, which is interesting if you were to like deal with uh what you see online, where Marxism is a dominant trend. Um, in you know, we're no more than at most three to five percent of the population at best. That's me being wildly optimistic, yeah. Uh but um but online we actually are a discourse that you actually have to reckon with, where you as uh in progressive media you don't, but progressive media has shifted pretty dramatically in the last year alone. So, for example, I mean in this this way, both admits that there's something to your thing about the breakdown of these old factions, but also problematizes it because it means that while there's a breakdown of these old factions, people may be cooperating for now, but they're also trying to seize the reins of what you know the left's end of liberalism is going to be in the future. And the one thing you may complain about Marxism is like increasingly we're opting out, we're just like you guys go do your own shit, we're tired of dealing with you, yeah. Um, and uh, you know who's come in? Um, former neocons are all over the place in M Best NBC world, um, right, and I find that interesting, and and I a lot of people would just say they're being unprincipled. They might be, they might not be. I

Identity Politics, Policy Limits, And Backlash

SPEAKER_01 34:18

actually have a hard time telling, uh, because they also seem to not be as pro uh self self-censuring as like standard centrist democrats are on certain things. Um I mean, frankly, they were more willing to call Trump fascist than a lot of leftists were, like exactly. Uh and so I find I find this moment really odd because on one hand you have that, on the other hand, and I had uh I had a a Christian Duganist on my on my show where I cover right-wing topics, and occasionally I've only done it once, but I'm gonna start doing it more. I'll interview uh a right winger who's willing to like take some criticism and and and actually kind of get a feel for what they're actually thinking, if you know they're not gonna threaten to put me in a camp or something. Um and you know, he told me that one of the interesting things about Trumpism was that it pulls from dissidents of of the left, and I was like, Well, that's interesting because I actually never thought you know, RFK Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard was on my side. I thought they were kind of bizarro crankish left liberals. Um but also I started looking at some some of these things, some of these just sociological studies that I don't think a lot of leftists have dealt with. And one of the things you have to deal with now is Trump has sorted parties in ways that are temperamentally conservative, but not ideologically conservative. So one of the things I'll say about that is like um medical conspiracism when I was coming up uh you know in my 20s was actually more common on the left than the right. You didn't counter it on the religious right a good bit, particularly around like the LDS, um, but it was not a default position at all, and you would easily find anti-baxxers on the left, there were plenty of them. Um and today that's sorted, that's almost completely sorted out. Um another thing, authoritarianism, um, as a personality trait, not as a thought-out ideology. Um the the Democrats and Republicans actually are pretty evenly divided on authoritarians because they always make up about 10 to 20 percent of the pop of any given population everywhere. Um they don't actually normally correspond to a singular ideology, despite you know what liberals would want. There's been plenty of leftists and liberals who have authoritarian tendencies, yeah. Um, maybe even myself included. Uh and um what I've seen is that is increasingly sorted out by political party for the first time, so it's not just that the ideologies are sorted out because I'm not you you want to talk about a crisis of ideology, I don't know what the GOP ideology post-liberalism actually even is. Like, I got no idea, like, because even things that people associate together, like national conservatism and white nationalism, those are actually kind of at odds, as is Tealist accelerationism. I mean, he's hyper right wing, but he thinks the white nationalists are too soft on the weaknesses of white people, and um, so does Nick Land. Uh uh, the it's the the the various, you know, Trumpism at first was a more secular movement, but it sorted the religious pr out pretty hard, and now there's this you know quasi-dominionist wing of Trumpism, um that's pretty strong that existed a little bit in the first Trump term, but it's really strong now, but that Trump himself doesn't seem to actually give a shit about, like so one of the things that I like one of the things that ironically, um, you know, we're talking about the incoherence of liberalism as an idea set, but one of the things that may be happening is the coalitions are actually cohering in types, except that other than identity, other than marginal identity, I don't know what the Democrats like coalition's based off of anymore.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Um Well, I think it's I think it's related to that phenomenon you mentioned um about like old neocons, like these ex-republicans frequenting CNN and MSNBC. I mean, that's what the Democrats represent. The Democrats represent a return to moderation and stability and kind of this blissful ignorance, which to a large degree I was in favor in favor of, but I do think we have to complicate it and deal with it more honestly than that. But I think that's the coalition. I mean, the coalition is people who want to go back, people who want stability. And on the other hand, I mean, the reason why you can have all those like medical radicals is is because I mean, yeah, that's their politics, is it's their disaffection, they're they don't care about stability, they don't care about trusting institutions, they don't trust them at all. I mean, you have to what's important is not only do some of those pseudo-left-wing people who who changed to the Republican side, not only do they change the Republican side, but but that's the only reason they changed. I mean, you can unironically find people who like the COVID era was their moment. Like that was the thing for them. That the pandemic and the vaccine and the locksdowns were so for whatever reason, so earth-chattering to them that that was their like solo changing moment. And all the rest of the stuff is kind of like whatever they can change over time. Maybe they won't even, maybe they'll just be left-wing on every other issue. But that one thing makes them so mad that they'll support Trump because he's anti-government in that way. And and that's I think that is really like, I mean, it's kind of a boring observation, but really that anti-establishment versus establishment kind of feeling is really what's driving a lot of the partisanship. And it's not based on actual state power, because if it was, they wouldn't be supporting Trump. I mean, they wouldn't be supporting a guy who's like this um like this incoherent on state power. I mean, Trump will do crazy things with state power. If you truly were like worried about state power, you wouldn't support him. But it's more about this feeling of the establishment and the anti-establishment that are driving so much of politics. And I do think it really is like affect. It's really feeling and and and kind of like you know, this kind of anti-politics affect that drives people in a certain direction. And that's why I would actually say that, you know, uh, I think what that what that what that person was saying, the the you know, the right-winger about uh left-wingers becoming Trumpists, I agree with you that I wouldn't be interested in Tulsi or RFK. Those aren't really left-wingers to me in any meaningful sense, they're barely liberals, um, I guess disaffected liberals, but they're definitely not leftists. But you can find actual leftists who were like radical Marxists or claims to be and became basically Trump supporters. I mean, we have to be honest. There's a huge section of, and and I think this is why I'm interested in breaking down a lot of these barriers, because there must be something about those people that is kind of reactionary and conservative, and they are able to find a coalition in the Trump world based on that. And we have to find whatever the counter-coalition to that is going to be. I don't think it can be this kind of blind liberalism. And to be honest with you, what I imagine, okay, my my dream is that the neocons and MSNBC and actual Marxists can have more dialogue with each other. I think they have more similarity at this moment than uh actual Marxists do with those Marxists who became Trumpists or RFK or whoever. I think that someone like you can legitimately have more dialogue

Anti‑Politics, Affect, And Generational Drift

SPEAKER_00 42:18

with you know the you know oldest, whitest, uh, ex-Republican uh that exists on MSNBC. I mean, I think you can. And I think that I represent kind of that, you know, that that converging interest, which is that there really is a desire to maintain this I don't know, this tradition of anti-authoritarianism, uh, this tradition of I don't know, intellectualism, because there is this very anti-intellectualism on the right. And that's what I'm interested in. I think we have to make these really strange alliances. I mean, that's really what I'm talking about. I mean, we have to make strange alliances. We have to we have to talk about these things. And it makes me sad that Marxists don't seem willing to do that because liberals seem too compromised to them. Um, and I would just say, listen, I mean, you have to you have to find the right liberals, and you have to realize that I mean most people aren't really that ideologically committed to begin with. Uh, and so you might as well talk to liberals, but not the liberals you might think, you know, not necessarily the liberals who are just like radical progressives. Those might not be the people who are most amenable to your position because your position isn't like exciting, it doesn't it doesn't animate that kind of impulse, right? And so, yeah, I think that's kind of the weird confusion that that people have to deal with. I mean, I actually on my show, I spoke with a uh never Trumper Republican, and I told him about Marxism. I told him about you know Louis Bonaparte and Bonapartism and and the critique of class, and he was like interested in it. He was very receptive to it, he was interested in it. And I think that's real. I think that's that's a real thing, is that we can have dialogue among among those of us who are interested in resuscitating an actual thoughtful tradition, and I think it's necessary. Otherwise, to be honest with you, the reason some people might say, like, you know, you want to hold on to this tradition, whatever it is, you want to have dialogue among leftists and never Trumpers and all this, you want to do this. Uh the reason is because honestly, I think the alternative is just pure tribalism. I think I think it really is going to become affect tribalism, where people sort into their personal camps based on their personal beliefs and their families, and they're just going to start hurting each other. And to be honest with you, when I look at like the Charlie Kirk assassination, I don't see that as having as having anything to do with ideology. I see that as politics becoming so unapproachable that people resort to their personal affect, their personal families, their personal feelings. That that's honestly what I see. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:43

Well, I mean, I hate to tell you, but most terrorism actually comes from that. Um you know, like we we could talk about the aesthetization of ideology as another as another, you know, um theoretical uh thing going on the back to Ben Hamin um on where that comes from. Um but um most when I was when I lived amongst a lot more radicals, like and I don't mean radicals in the sense of like I say crazy shit on X. I mean when I was in Egypt and I knew people who had fought, you know, who'd done street violence against other people, who had sided with governments that put the uh the uh their oppositions in jail and then had to sit uh at the table with them afterwards. Yeah, um, the biggest thing that moved people to violence that actually was lethal um tended to be frankly personal. Um whereas ideological violence um is real, I mean it happens. Um but one uh for most for most things it's for it's aimed at either soft targets or people closer to your side, like who statistically speaking, if you were a leftist in the 70s and you got killed and it wasn't by some local cops because the COINTELPRO turned your case over to local cops and they got gun heavy, right? Which is actually probably the number one way American leftists were killed, and that and even then you're only dealing with a few hundred um which is probably more than people realize, but it's not it's not astronomical at all. Right. Um the persons, the people who are most likely to kill you were the leftists, like just straight up, like we murdered each other in the 60s and 70s. Um and and and places where there was, I mean, like if you think about the aftermath of the Vietnam War in Cambodia, that's a Marxist Leninist party fighting another Marxist-Leninist party with two Marxist-Leninist mega states having proxy wars in in that conflict, yeah. Um, which bled over to like Latin America and even in the states, um, and it occasionally became violent, and it occasionally produced a lot of like so a lot of neoconservatives, a lot of the old neoconservatives, like David Horowitz. David Horowitz was a Maoist who uh became convinced that during the contestation in the Sino-Soviet split that one of his friends was killed by the Black Panthers. Like, that's his origin story, yeah. Okay, I we don't know if one of his friends was killed by the Black Panthers, like it's never been proven one way or the other, but that's his that's his pivot turn. Um, Robert Reich was a Maoist. I know people don't know, I mean, people talk about Van Jones, but Robert Reich, you know, good old liberal was a Maoist, uh, who had ties to Baba Vacian's Revolutionary Communist Party through the SDS, and um because of some of the events around the SDS, he became a kind of standard liberal and got integrated into the Clinton, you know, orbit and all that. Uh, I bring I bring this up because like I think one thing you have to reckon with though when it comes to Marxist in particular, maybe not all socialist leftists, but it comes to Marxist in particular, we have two ways in which we think this can go as far as us and institutions. We can take them over, or we can destroy them and build them anew. And I guess there's the third option after Delusing Guitarie, uh, the French theorist that led to accelerationism is we can let them destroy themselves and take them over. Now, I think the third option is objectively insane. Historically, it's ended in fascism, right? Um if you remember, you know, uh to the relatively unpopular social democrats in the Weimar Republic, what the communists used to say was, you know, after the Nazis us. So, you know, well, and only in the very, very like very late, did this did the when a lot of the social democratic

Marxists, Liberals, And Alliance Models

SPEAKER_01 49:08

party was in exile, and when in France and Italy, uh during the Popular Front, which I actually am kind of a skeptic of, but I'm gonna paint the heroic version of the story here. Did you see some people finally going, like, okay, we have to save some of the the social democrats, we can't let them be annihilated, they are our allies. Um, it also happened very late with the social democrats. The social democrats became more and more rapidly anti-communist until 1929, and by that point they were almost all liquidated. And these are things to like think about when it comes to today. Uh, so I don't know if you know what the I talk in Marxist ease sometimes, and so having someone like you on the show is actually good because it makes me not do that. Um but in the historical traditions, um, there are kind of three are four basic Marxist orientations towards liberals. Um, there's what we call ultra-leftism, which is you make no truck with them at all. Um now there's more involved with ultra-leftism historically, and like most of what we would call today ultra-left wouldn't meet that criterion, but I'm just gonna keep this here. Um, there is uh a kind of ultra-left adjacent position, uh, but it was also maintained by the Comintern, the the group, the Communist International, during the Stalin period until 1936. And this is called the United Front from Below, but no United Front from above. What that meant was you could join with liberals and unions and civic associations, but you couldn't join with them in political parties or sit in a government with them. All right. Now, I'm not worried about Marxists sitting in a government anytime real soon, so maybe this is irrelevant. Um, there's then the classical united front, which you can you cannot sit in a government with liberals, but you could empower them to beat reactionary forces by selective obstruction. All right, so there'd be times where we're like, we're not gonna fuck with the liberals on this, we'll let them do their thing, right? And then there'd be times where we would be like, Oh, we're not gonna let you do that, we're gonna mess up your vote. Um, then there's a popular front, which is where you actually join them outright. Um, one of the historical reasons why it's hard to convince Marxists to do that uh is because it was the mechanism by which the set the second or third or fourth, depending on how you're counting, red scare in the 1950s was able to purge all the Marxists. Because it's actually true what the Berchers said about the Democratic Party, they were full of communists uh during during the end of World War II because we were in a military alliance with the Soviet Union. Um, and the Popular Front said, Okay, communists, you can work with them, you can work with the FDR administration, and at the state level under Truman, and then at the federal level under Eisenhower, the they were perched, and like in so much that there's any memory from communists about liberals at all, because I admittedly the new f kind of erases all this history, like the the way the new left emerged. This is it kind of just becomes it's weird. Americans don't really understand this history. Um even American leftists, like you know, the five percent that might identify as Marxists, they don't really grok this either. Yeah, um, is that we get purged from the AFL and CAO, we get kicked out of the Democratic Party, and then we get blacklisted from civil society. And we didn't get killed like in many other places, so there's that. I mean, well, most of us didn't get there. Was some a few killings, but most of us didn't get killed. Um and what the it led to a couple of things. It led to the new left, it led to communists having out in universities. It it also led to this weird tendency for communists to correlate on these coastal cities, but actually the new left Marxists were actually in the Midwest. I could explain that to you, but it takes a long time. But this historical memory is part of why we just don't trust liberals, like there is a sense that we like we've been betrayed by you so many times. Why should we trust you again? After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, I think a lot of people were like, Well, liberals are the only game in town, but then the liberalism that was dominant, you know, at that time period, that's Blair, that's Clinton, that's that's the that's the Atari Democrats becoming the DNC, uh and the D and the DLC and and and all that. Um it's hard for any of us to be for particularly those of us who are over 25, to feel good about that. Um so I guess I guess you know part of the problem is we have like we still have two options. If you see the DSA, the DSA isn't one of the options. Uh we'll work with the Democrats, we'll even join their party, but we eventually want to split it into two different parties. And the fact is, I've always said, like, okay, you want to do that, but why would you tell people that? Because if they know that, they're know that you're they're never gonna give you any power, like, because they know what you want to do. Like, um, so I guess my my question is to you is like, yeah, that there might need to be coalitions, you know. Um I'm a united frontist myself. I have no problem being like, we should leave the liberals alone on this one, are uh you know, and there's there are Marxists you've had on who are you know basically popular frontists, um, or even so much, maybe even beyond that. I mean, Matt McManus is more than a popular frontist. He basically thinks that the socialist tradition and the liberal tradition should re-merge together, right? Um, and then there's united frontists, but right now, and I think this is interesting because this is even true for like Marxist Leninists who historically have been popular front people. Uh, there's like no trust of the Democratic Party, and uh a lot of us feel like we need to get rid of them, but there is a lot of influence of identitarian left liberalism. So I guess this brings me to another question. Um the I think a lot of the problems of identity, uh uh marginalization of rate of race and gender are very real and are not just subsets of the class problem, but they are

Capital, Tech Billionaires, And State Power

SPEAKER_01 55:52

separate. Um, or they're related, but not not subsumed by. Let me actually what I'd actually say, they're not separate. Um, but that a lot of ways that the what we might call the radical liberals today, rad libs are you know, Marxists, we often call them shit libs. Um that we see them as engaged in a in a pseudo-radical project that is largely academic and that has had a disproportionate effect on liberal talking points, but no effect on liberal policy, like none, like literally none. There's I mean that there was some attempt to with DI, but not really. Uh, you know, reparations, no one was took that seriously. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff that was floated around during the first Trump administration by progressives that I don't even think they really believe they were gonna do. Um, maybe I'm wrong, maybe a lot of them did, but I don't really think like they would make moral arguments for reparations. Some of them might even might even agree with morally, but I'm like, but it's not a political project, like this is not there. Um what role do you think that played? Because I know a lot of I know a lot of like social democrat, like social democratic types who'd be very willing to get on the kind of coalition you're proposing, more than me. Um, who uh think that was that's the reason why we can't, like, and I I find that interesting because I'm like, I don't even think that's a dominant posture in the Democratic Party anymore. But what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_00 57:26

Yeah, I mean, I think that I was kind of hinting that at that earlier that I think I'm more interested in in reaching full-on leftists than those kinds of radical liberals. Um, because I I think their beliefs are frankly uh just kind of underdeveloped and incoherent. And I think a lot of people get confused and they think like that I'm some kind of progressive liberal because I must be if I'm talking to leftists, uh, but that's not the case at all. I mean, I sympathize with a lot of progressive liberal positions for sure. I'm not like completely anti-that, but I'm not one of those people. I mean, I'm not interested in radical uh like I think race politics is real. I think we should talk about race, but like a lot of these radical progressivisms just are incoherent, just go way too far. And frankly, I think they're unreachable because they are so based on, I think, the degradation of politics, they're so anti-political, um, they're so they're so much based on this like affect and anti-politics that I don't really think you can reach them. I mean, they just have their personal issues. It's really the mirror of the people who got so traumatized by the vaccine in the in the lockdown that they became Republicans. It's really the mirror of that, right? I mean, people who are Democrats or call themselves Marxists based on you know third worldism or something like that, um, the worst versions of it are just not like coherent, right? I mean, those people are I just don't think they're serious. I don't think you can really work with them. Uh, at some point you'll have to, but you just can't base a project off of that, I think. And so I think I would yeah, I would agree.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

I think about the people that during Gaza were like, well, if the Native Americans rose up and had to kill us all, that I would just like I'd hide under the rock, but I'd let it happen. And I'm like, in what world do you think that that 98% are okay, even let's even factor out black people. So let's say 19 of the population is is gonna be able to just kill all of you know the remaining 45 and to deport the rest to some vague place. Like, like to me, that's not a political vision, that's a revenge fantasy. Yeah, um, you know, settler colonialism is something I think is very real. Um, and I don't want to mock it, but like even the land, even the people I know involved in the in the indigenous tribes who are into landback, they don't talk that way. Yeah, like I bet, yeah. Um, I'm not gonna say none of nobody does, but most of them do not. That's not what they mean. And then further furthermore, um I I look at the situation of both the voting patterns on the reservations, which with the exception of the of the Dine of the Navajo Nation, are actually very conservative because rural politics rural politics in those areas. Um, and B, um uh that vision hasn't fixed anything on the res. It hasn't given you know indigenous people any more of their treaty rights back, it hasn't uh given them more representation and in any. Form of uh participatory government. Um, it it hasn't even got them plumbing. Um, and so uh, you know, I'm like, well, who's asking you to do that? Because even indigenous people don't really seem to be, and yeah, so that seems to me to be totally performative, it's not politics, it's a it's a moral posture, uh, and one that's frankly delusional, even if it's based off of real historical concerns. Um, uh you know, I don't even like calling that Lamb back. I know a lot of leftists will attack Lamback as being that, but that's when I've talked to like indigenous leaders and stuff on my show, that's not what they say. So it's it's just an interesting problem. So, what do you deal with that? Wait, I think one of the things I want to ask you, and I've been hinting at anti-politics, but well, what do you think anti-politics is? There's a lot of people, there's a few people on the left, some of whom became basically Trumpists, actually. Yeah, um, I I think of Dr. Tad Teaser from Australia, who who's who's at least very soft on Trump. Um, but that used to be called anti-political Marxism. Um, but what do you think anti-politics is, and why do you think it's so dominant right now amongst certain kinds of progressives and certain kinds of leftists? Um because to me I worry about it a lot because I just like I look at Gen Z and people like, oh, Gen Z's, you know, the predictions about Gen Z as a cohort, particularly the male variety, on how progressive are regressive they are, that narrative has has shifted 180 degrees in less than two years. Yeah, and I suspect it'll shift again because we're seeing uh Gen Z revolts against you know a lot of these quasi-bonapartist governments, too. And if you look at how unstable like Trump support is amongst even identified Republicans under under 30, um it doesn't line up to either narrative at all, but there's got to be something driving that. That's just not a political vision. So, like, what do you see going on there? You're closer to that generation to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:01

Uh kind of not that much, but I mean, I want I want to make like three uh big points. So there's a lot here. But uh first of all, I want to re actually I'll I'll leave that for last because it's it's like the most different. But on the generation question, um I I honestly feel

Building Honest Dialogue And Shared Ground

SPEAKER_00 1:03:17

that I mean, and first of all, I'm not very familiar with my generation. I mean, I kind of I'm looking at them from the outside for the most part. I don't I haven't really known people from my generation for a long time. So that that's an unfortunate circumstance. But my feeling would be that most generations are kind of like this. Uh, I think if you go back 10 or 15 years ago, millennials were completely incoherently defined. I mean, millennials were like a punching bag, they were all sorts of different things. Now that time has passed, I think now you can start to actually put a finger on what the millennials are, and you can start to talk about that, right? I think Gen Z is very much in the same situation where it's gonna take another 10 years to have any idea of what Gen Z is. I think they're they're too young, uh, too confused, uh, and we're too biased in our the way we look at them at the moment to really have a solid handle. But if I had to make any prediction, really the defining, and this leads into the next point, really the defining thing about Gen Z will probably be, even in retrospect, Trump. Um, in the sense that Trump really opens up the at least it makes one see feel as if Trump opens up the political horizon so much that you might as well become a Nazi, or you might as well become like a Leninist, Maoist. I mean, it it it it opens up that political horizon. But uh it really is this kind of anti-politics. And yeah, I mean, anti-politics for me, I'm I'm wary of treating it like a contemporary phenomenon. Like, oh, everyone's just so modern technology and modern people, they're just anti-politics, and I'm really wary of analyzing things in that way. I think the first thing you have to do is look at historical analogs and even philosophical ideas, and really I think I'm really interested in Nietzsche, and I think the most interesting idea of Nietzsche for me is his idea his his ideas of psych psychology and affect and how they and and how you know so much of what we do is really deceptive, um, deceptive to ourselves, especially. And I think that's kind of how I see anti-politics. I think anti-politics is really a psychological problem of self-deception, um, and an inability to kind of understand what your goals are, what your goals should be, or weigh your goals appropriately. Um, we can even see it in kind of Marxist theory. We can see in a version of this when we talk about um, you know, misapprehension, a lack of class consciousness. You know, Marxists are very aware of the fact that a lot of rural people or workers are very conservative or reactionary. Obviously, this is a problem that Marxists had to deal with for a long time. And the way it's talked about is that there is some kind of delusion there, or some kind of uh lack of information, some kind of an illusion that you have to work with. And I think that's really just true of kind of the human per se. I think it's a very human problem. And this is why I'm interested in philosophy, is because I really think we have to ask this question also of like, what is the human subject? Uh, what kind of you know, what kind of delusions are we dealing with? How can we overcome them? Uh, what is how does this translate into politics? And that's why when I talk about politics, I just have such a huge preference for people who are honest, or what I perceive to be honest, people who are radically um self-critical and very honest about kind of how they reach their positions and and their inco their their own incoherence, and they're honest about that. Um, and that's one of the things I dislike the most about you know these ultra-left uh radicals that exist today, or the Trumpists. I mean, these people to me, their biggest problem is their lack of honesty and their and their lack of like kind of awareness. And I think that is really what defines them, uh you know, outside of their ideology. And yeah, so I guess I mean these are just kind of like gestures and hints at an answer, but I really do think anti-politics is this kind of psychological deep problem. And I don't think it's like a modern society problem, although it might be the case that you know that's making it worse or that's making it manifest in a particular way, but I don't think we should just pass it off as it's a modern problem. Uh, because I think that makes you kind of, I think when you're doing that, you're kind of throwing your hands up and you're just kind of like, let's forget about all human history. We have no memory, we have no history. Uh, and I think you're putting yourself in a very hopeless position. So I don't think you should do that. I think you have to look at history, and we do have to deal with this problem. But uh, yeah, I mean, I I guess that's the best I can do on that. But the last thing I wanted to say, the last point I want to make is I wanted to return to what you said earlier about, you know, Marxists don't want to ally with liberals because they get betrayed. And yeah, I mean, I've thought about this a lot. I've thought about, you know, I'm coming in here and I'm like, hey guys, let's all be friends. And I realize that everyone's kind of aware, on my side and on your side, that at a certain point, like our differences are going to exist. I mean, you can't have people who believe in like liberal capitalism and people who believe in like a you know a revolutionary society of some kind. You can't have those people permanently on the same side. At some point, that has to come up. If they are on the same side, it's because they're is such an enormous enemy on the other side they're fighting, or something like that. I guess my answer to that right now, and I it's probably not satisfying to a lot of leftists, um, but it it's basically that our our historical experience tells us that neither leftism nor liberalism is very coherent. And so I think trying to define allies based on what happened in the past is basically irrelevant. We really need to reconstruct from scratch what these things are. Um, and if you if you're working with a liberal political party, like I would, for example, I don't think you have to work with the Democrats because the Democrats have shown themselves to be essentially grasping onto the past in such a way that you can't really honestly grapple with issues up with them. And so that's fine. Um, but when it comes to someone like myself who is somewhat of a committed liberal but is also trying to find the coherence of that ideology, um I guess what I would ask for is more honesty from leftists about the incoherence of their ideology. And I would say we have to deal with that first. We have to deal with that first before we can even imagine what the dynamics would look like in the future. Um because

Closing Reflections And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 1:09:15

I just don't think you can replicate. I I think like I think what happened in the past made sense because leftists had said, you know what, we want to do a revolution, we think we can do a revolution, and that ended up being a certain thing. And liberals had said, listen, we're fighting the Soviet Union, we have to get these people out of our society, they're gonna undermine it from it then. And those problems can be replicated in kind. Um, but I I I think it would be you know shallow or illegitimate if we just assumed that it would take place in that exactly that form when we haven't even figured out like what we believe in, really. I mean, I think we have to have real political movements before we ask that question.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:54

Well, I would I mean, like, look, I I think the LARPing of the middle of the 20th century is one of the most tired things that everyone's doing right now. I think that's true for the Democrats. I think it's true for the Democratic Socialist, actually, even though they're a little bit less blatant about it. I very much think it's through from Marxist-Leninists who somehow think that they can have a long march with the butt with a protracted peasants' war in the United States where there literally are no peasants, um, or that they hope the third world, um, regardless of the economic analysis of third worldism, the idea that the the most dominated and fractured classes of of the modern world are gonna liberate everybody and get revenge. That to me is an eschatological fantasy, even if you believe in some of the analysis about what's happening to the third world and why you know we need a more addressed war towards them and why national developmentalism in the core would never be good enough, and why we need anti-imperialism. I would agree with all those things actually. Um, but I just think that the the most extreme forms of third worldism, which I I don't know how many people actually believe. I know people I know some people who do, um just seem to me to be like wish casting, and they're also very uncharitable towards the possibility of liberation in your own society. You just basically are saying, I mean, to me, it's not just you're giving up on liberals, you're giving up on the left pretty much everywhere else. Um, you know, Tut and I, uh, you know, of the people that you've talked to, um Tut and I are the are probably um the closest, although Tut would probably uh say that I have ultra-leftist tendencies, and I would probably say he has Bonapartist tendencies, but um he would not like that. Um one thing I would I would say about that, and I say this because Tut's probably, like I said, one of the closest people that you've had on there. I also like Mac McManus a lot. Um uh I have a wary uh appreciation for Chris Katroni, he's one of the people who taught me indirectly, um, but it's a wary appreciation. Uh but I I I think one of the things that you'll see is even in this relatively small sample size of the Marxist left, and it's a small sample size, um the positions are wildly deviant from each other. Um like extremely so uh and one of the things I've been trying to do is get the left to look at itself and look at its history more coherently, and then also look at the other side. Because I'll tell you from my perspective, I talk a lot about talism and how you don't tail liberals and you don't tail conservatives and you don't pretend to care about their cultural stuff. But I actually do think you have to appeal to relatively conservative-minded working class people, and you have to somehow make a you need the skills, if for no other reason, than a lot of professional liberals to be able to stand up to uh a very decadent bourgeoisie. And I I one of the things that is the the is a difference between Trump one and Trump Two is it was very clear that capitalists were very were were very leery about Trump one, and even if they're still leery about Trump Two, they aren't making that known right. Um and it's also very clear that it uh and this is an economic thing, but the economic policies of Obama, particularly the way you handle the bailout, um and which led to development of things like BlackRock and um and led to SpaceX. It actually is a direct contributor to both Peter Thiel and Elon Musk being some of the richest people in our economy because of the way they structured quantitative easing and focused on tech in a particular way, and gave and like allowed those sectors to be unprofitable for a very long period of time, longer than capitalism would normally allow, and protected venture capital investments in there, that they created their own monsters, you know. Yeah, and yeah, it's true that like Teal and Mark Andreessen were never really Democrats. It's I don't know about Elon Musk, he may have actually believed that shit at one time. Um probably not, but I I really don't know. Um uh but someone like Bezos and Zuckerberg, they seem to have known where their their bread was buttered and they've very much shifted sides. Um and I think that puts uh that puts liberalism in a really strange place because also if we look economically, nobody has a good way to to restart this economy if the if the AI um if the I if the AI does not become profitable outside of um uh data centers and uh chips, because otherwise you have a bubble, it will eventually break, and when it breaks, it's gonna spill out upon uh uh uh onto everything. Um and like in a way that won't even mirror uh uh the the the Great Depression. I mean, one of the things that we have to like ask ourselves right now is like right now we have an economy where even consumer spending is only supported by like 10% of the population and the upper 10%. Um uh liberalism's not supposed to produce that. I mean, you know, it's not supposed to produce an even more unequal society than feudalism. Um, and one without any means of subsistence for a lot of people. I mean, it literally would be, you know, Peter Thiel's like both calling people who critique him the Antichrist and calling anyone who critiques AI the Antichrist, while also saying that maybe we just need to accept that the human race is over and that the robots are gonna rule and we're gonna have to give all our power and everything up for that on it on like a uh a sacrifice of like I don't know, eight billion people um for a few rich dudes. Uh like how do you deal with that? I mean, that's you know if you want to talk about something you should be able to get liberals to get behind fighting, you know, that seems like it's easy, and yet, and yet there's no political force in a lot of the English-speaking world for that to really fight that. It doesn't seem to exist right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:39

Yeah, I mean, the issue of capitalism is obviously something that I I mean, I have to deal with it. Uh, I have less strong opinions on it because I just feel like I have to have uh such a like deeper understanding of like the economy and the history of it that I just don't feel like it's my strongest suit, but it is something that I have to deal with. And yeah, I mean, one of the things that scared me about Trump too was how quickly that the billionaires just like just flip-flopped. I mean, these are I mean, it really reveals, I think, very transparently, that these are very weak people. Um, like I just have like absolutely no respect for like these kinds of people. It's not that they're yeah, I mean, they they just are so weak and spineless. Um, they're so beneath politics, they're kind of anti-politics in their own way, um, that they can just flip on a dime uh based on you know affect. And I think the scariest part is that it's not even like a lot of people will accuse them of, well, they're you know, they're being uh they're just following their interests. I think the scariest thing is how genuine it probably is. Um I think I think it is genuine, I think it is genuine in the sense that these kinds of people and the state of our politics don't even know that they're being hypocritical. They're just like, oh yeah, I mean, Trump is good for America, Obama made me feel like he was good for America. Let's go. Like, I I think that's I think I think we really have to deal with um what happens when politics is so degraded that all of these important people they can be this weak and spineless and incoherent. And you know, as far as like their influence, I mean it's complicated. I have always been skeptical of the idea. This is kind of a naive leftist view. I don't think it's a real leftist view, but you know, kind of the idea that money controls everything is just so common and just so frustrating to me. I've always been interested in state power and politics and political organization. And to me, it seems obvious that the state has so much influence over the economy and and and the people in it that you know it it it's a it's a more complicated thing. It's more like the state creates the economy and the economy reciprocally controls the state in a way that the state allowed to take place, and it's some kind of problem there. And I think you have to deal with that. And I I honestly don't know how you deal with that. I mean, I mean, this is why I think people like you know Peter Thiel or these billionaires are our enemies. It's because again, they're they're they're wearing masks, they're they're diluted, they they're not truly apprehending what politics is. And that's why I think we need to have an alliance or some sort of dialogue between people who see through that, because it's just so incoherent. I mean, it's so deeply incoherent. I I just can't even like fathom how like you know it can't be it can't be the case that we have these people who have such an elementary like view of politics and they go on Joe Rogan and they're like lecturing about political history that they don't understand, and they're giving like like genuine, genuinely high school level opinions. And that just can't be the case. That just can't that just can't be like there there has to be this is a problem, like this is a problem for your state. If your state is producing this kind of power, this is a problem. Uh, if your economic system is producing this, I mean you have to figure out like can it be controlled? Uh what does it mean? What does it mean? I mean, you you have to figure these questions out. And I just feel like genuinely for every one of these questions, I just feel like there isn't a genuine grappling with them. You know, I'm frustrated when I watch CNN because they don't ask these questions. Like, if you watch CNN, they're like, whatever, we like innovation, I guess. We just don't like Trump because he goes too far, and and it's just very incoherent, they won't stand on a principled understanding of these issues, but at the same time, leftists won't. Leftists will just kind of say, Yeah, billionaires are evil, they're bad people, and I'm sorry, but that's not gonna get anywhere, like that's not gonna solve any problems, it's just truly not. And uh I find that weird actually.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:26

I mean, I find it weird for a bunch, yes, we think that billionaires are are a structurally inhibited contradictory force historically. Actually, you know, we didn't talk much about billionaires as just evil because we don't think the problem is just greed, we don't think it's a moral, or I shouldn't say we like historically, Marxists have not thought this problem was a moral problem because we actually thought that the the accumulation that capitalist greed, and I'm putting that in quotation marks to people listening, enabled if it could be reappropriated and expropriated from its source and spread back to society, would actually allow us to do things that we've never been historically able to do because otherwise our we we realize that our schemas would take us back to the fucking bronze age at best. Um, we know that. Like, we're not stupid, um and so like whether or not these billionaires are good or bad, I think a lot of this particular grasp of billionaires are bad, but it's not because they're it's not just because they're billionaires, and for me, I mean I'm gonna just you know, you might be uncomfortable with this. I think this is because of the detente between progressive moralist and socialist have kind of fallen apart since uh actually because for such a long time we've both been called socialists, and only one of us are um, that there's a lot of Marxists who've internalized these kind of dialogues too. And I'm just like, it doesn't matter if these are good people or bad people, like it's not that's not the point. This particular batch seems particularly bad, right? But for me, even that's not because of their morality, it's because of a particular set of shitty incentive structures. And yes, like I think Peter Thiel is like a Batman villain, but um um nonetheless, I mean, you talk about a guy who's literally like we need to drink the butter babies, and then like I'm okay with ending the world to prop up my little AI project, but most of them aren't that that blatant, most of them aren't that you know, crass. Um and you know, I think one of the things that's interesting to me about this, you know, we we talk about the Democrats a lot. I've actually argued that the Democrats have become the small C conservative party and that they're trying to conserve something of the past, where uh like they're a liberal party, but they're a conservative liberal party now because they don't really have a positive agenda. Um, I mean, parts of them do, like the Green New Deal and all this, but like if you look at what they actually do, they don't. Uh, you know, their primary goal right now, if you look at the abundance people, um, seems to be to win portions of the tech billionaires back um to a slightly less brutal form of what's going on now. It's like you know, neoliberalism with a human AI face. Um there's the chorus people who seem to be good at anti-Trumpism, but that's it. They're not they're not concerned about presenting presenting a positive vision after Trump. And I do think that is a strategic mistake that you see in most of the coalitions in in liberal spheres, is like they don't have there is no positive vision. I mean, this is also true for the GOP. Once Trump is gone, it's going to be a low-key civil war. Like, like, if you think about the different factions, even in the current form of the Trumpist coalition, they're gonna turn we're already seeing some of them turn on each other. Uh Laura Loomer and Marjorie Taylor Green, for example. Um uh you're um uh Besnitt and what's his face? Uh the other economic advisor.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:27

Uh Lutnik.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:28

Yeah, Lutnik. There's tensions between them. Um there was very clearly tensions between them and Doge. Uh yeah. Uh it's it's also clear that um uh despite all the the appearance of solidarity, Hegzith from some stuff we know that have been linked to the Minneapolis Tribune because they won't stop using Signal, uh is actually a little scared about the extent that which Steve Miller wants to push things about using the military as a form of police, like you know, like even Hegzith is a little afraid of that. Interesting. Um uh yeah, that came out because they were using it on signal and somebody took a picture of it of the phone on a signal chat at a funeral. Like it's just yeah, it's just like man, you guys, you guys are not. Um if some random uh uh reporter in Minnesota can do it, guess who else can do it? But anyway, um I I I do I do think this kind of leads us to a problem, though. I mean, I I think a problem for liberals in America is gonna be what do you do after this? Because if you just think you can return to a status quo, if you look at what what Biden did, right? Biden tried to rationalize and make slightly more progressive a bunch of policies that were really introduced in Tamperon. An attempt at reindustrialization, he just tried to make it more green, an attempt at uh infrastructure investment, which Trump has seemingly abandoned, he just doesn't care anymore. But he used to really care about it. Yeah, um uh while Biden didn't do this particularly well, um I would argue he actually maintained a whole lot of Trump error, uh Trump won error immigration policies. Um and I find this very interesting because it just looks like you guys, like you guys, I shouldn't say that like you, you're not a representative of the Democratic Party. We do have to separate liberalism from the Democratic Party, which a lot of people have a hard time doing. But um that there's not really any animating philosophy behind this. Now, I get you, uh there's never been a coherent ideology on the planet, and political philosophy has always been price meal. I mean, like, this is absolutely true. I spent a lot of my time thinking about the cul de saxon Marxism that just we have not ever worked out, and they're big, like what we think nation states are for, like there's like that's not settled. Um, you know, fundamental basic thing we don't agree amongst ourselves and never have, and there's no textual answer to it easily, either, right? Um, uh, how do you incorporate um people who've been subject under prior colonialism? That's not actually settled either. Like, um, these kinds of things are not clear, and it's it's I think for a long time it's been for a long time for Marxists, that's been okay because let's be quite frank, um, Marxism after 1992, unless unless you were in China or Vietnam, um, or maybe the DPRK question mark or Kuba was not really a live um discussion in the developed world, and in the developing world, it was more about Maoism and and national liberation and and peasant and and the abolition of the peasantry. Um, so that puts us today in kind of a bind because our own imagination, like my frustration with Marxist right now, is our imagination pretty much pretty much seems to be either can we win these academic debates between each other, or can we have our 20th century back pick the part of the 20th century you like? Like, be it social democratic Norway or um the USSR or uh China in the 70s or China in the 80s or China in the 90s, you know, like which of those things do you want? And the problem I have is that from a Marxist perspective, the material conditions for all of that don't exist. That we're in a different set of material and social conditions, our relations are different, the factory models don't sign anymore, there is no peasantry. Um, there more and more people are proletarianized from our perspective, meaning that they are wage earners. Uh, less and less people have ever work in the productive sectors of the economy, anywhere, not just in not just here, it's all over. Like, um, and so our concerns are also fragmented and shot, right? So I agree with you on this honesty thing. The thing is, though, you know, if I'm talking to a liberal, I have to put my liberal hat on, I have to remind myself of liberal institutions, and like because you and I, if I was talking pure Marx and you were talking pure liberals, we just talk past each other. We have a completely different epistemic explanation for why things are the way they are. Like, um, and so I mean, the dialogue that you want is hard because it's not just a matter of us not trusting each other because of historical reasons, but even if we drop that, we don't talk the same way. Like when we get into our theoretical frameworks, they're not totally incompatible. We all come out of 18th century liberalism somehow, but we're not compatible either. Like, the way we talk about like if you put me in a room with Ezra Klein, god forbid, that would be weird. But um I feel like we just start yelling at each other a bit. I mean, he would be much more you know demure about it and have his nice beard and whatever, but uh, and he'd sound he he'd sound really intelligent until I thought about what he said. Um but We would be talking past each other all day. Like just straight past each other. And if anything, it's easier for me to understand him than for him to understand me.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:57

Yeah, probably. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:58

Um, and so like that's a big problem to this dialogue right now. We do one of the things that I've been really thinking about is like, okay, even if I don't want to sit in government, I don't want my people sitting in government with your people. Like, let's be let's be frank, we're not even close to that happening. Like, yeah, uh, you know, so so how do I even get this dialogue where I can understand your concerns and you can understand mine? And that's where I like to rebut your show, actually, because I I do think that's a huge problem right now. Uh because one of the things that I think is not I agree with you, a lot of the things we see on the internet are they're not new because they're new, they're new because the internet makes them easier and more ubiquitous, right? Like, um, so so Marxists have always been niched off, right? If anything, the internet makes it where we're less niched off. But um you can be in a like you can be in a group and and talk to hundreds of even thousands of people, you know, you might even have like 10, 20,000 followers on Twitter and still not realize that despite that massive amount of following, you are in a super niche part of society because that now that that is an aggregated number from all over the planet, right? You know, from a population of like 8 billion.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:32

So no one has a real like you really can't limit yourself to who you're talking to unless you have a very real-world instantiated like career. Um, and I mean, one of the things I talk about in regards to like a lot of Marxist and left media figures, is they don't like like they don't have like a normal job, like um, unfortunately, it's also true for a lot of Gen Z for other reasons. Um, and so it does make this uh ability to talk to each other or understand each other's epistemic or moral assumptions a lot harder to do. Um, do you have an answer? I mean, I know that's part of your whole project. I mean, that's why I'm interested in your project, but like, yeah, do you have an answer to that? Because Marxists talking to other Marxists does not make new Marxists very often.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:26

Like, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I I've brought up this problem multiple times. Uh, like the different language problem is really frustrating because I mean I really had to put myself out. Um, I mean, I mean, just privately, I really had to like intentionally make the effort to learn the language of Marxists to you know figure out like who are these thinkers they're talking about, you know, how do they use these words? And I like doing that, I like understanding different groups of people of all kinds, so that comes very naturally to me. Um, but obviously, I mean, there's two problems with that. One is that it requires the other side to do that for me, to you know, kind of be open to dialoguing with me and using my language. And I do think on average, like Marxists are probably better at dialoguing with liberals than the reverse, just because they're so you know, we live in a society full of liberals, yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, but the other problem is that um uh what you're kind of posing is I mean, how do you make this like a broader thing that happens, you know, outside of my my one little case here? And I don't know, I mean, I I think that really everyone has to make an effort to change the way that they they deal with these things. I think everyone has to be more willing to have conversation, um, but have conversation in a way that is honest about your differences. I I don't think there's that much value in, you know, as recline having on Ben Shapiro and them just kind of like vaguely gesturing at things that they believe. I don't really think that is dialogue um because they're not really being honest about where they come from, in some cases because they don't know where they come from, um, and to some extent because if they were honest, they wouldn't want to have the conversation anymore. And I think that's the problem is that we need to, again, kind of be honest with ourselves and kind of you know realize that we're gonna have to have uncomfortable conversations, we're gonna have to actually be honest about what we believe, and that's gonna have to take a different form. I mean, one of the things that people thought would happen is that the internet would be like the public square times a hundred. Everyone's gonna be more honest, we're gonna have so many more opinions, and the internet is really actually periled in an extreme dumbing down of discourse. People don't talk to people who disagree with them. Um, if they do, again, they do it in a way that's very safe and doesn't actually challenge either party. Um, people go into echo chambers and just kind of repeat the same talking points, and it they become dumber, and it's not really important the arguments are good. I mean, these are all problems. And I mean, really, my my only answer is that every single person who's listening to this and who's in this space has to do something different. I mean, we have to challenge ourselves to not just engage with the other side, you have to engage in a way that is genuinely honest towards what they believe and what you believe. And that could be a super heated debate. Uh, that could be a really nice conversation. It could go all, it could be anything between that. But what it has to be is honest. Um, and a lot of the ways that we have dialogue now are not honest. I think people are holding their cars to their chest, their chest. I mean, anyone who's in the podcast space or watches podcasts knows that there's a lot of like political games being played in the sense that, you know, we don't want to talk about the things we disagree on. We don't want to, you know, we don't want to burn bridges and all this. And while that's an understandable impulse and an unavoidable impulse and sometimes a good impulse, I think we have to have an impulse for, I don't know, the truth, I guess. And we have to really be having these conversations and forcing ourselves and the people around us to deal with these things. I think we should be, I think we should be averse to people who are, you know, on our side who aren't open to that. I think we I think we have to be pushing the people around us and say, you know, I know you believe that, and I agree with you, but the way you're getting there is not you're not really dealing with all these issues. I mean, you're just kind of getting there and lucky, you're kind of getting lucky, I guess, and you have this position for whatever reason because of your disposition, your affect. But let's like work through this. Let's actually work through this, let's actually put everything out there, let's actually have a dispute. And yeah, I mean, it's really hard for me to say how to do that or get people to do that, but I I do think that I mean, those are some some ideas of how it has to be done. And yeah, I do think it takes engagement from everyone. I think everyone can do that in some way or contribute to that that culture.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:40

I would I would say, you know, I think this might be a good place to wrap up, but I'm gonna give one last question and one last statement, and we can go from there. I I do think one of the reasons why I have to deal with both liberals and conservatives so much is I'm in a union. I'm in a union of teachers, uh the the bat, and I'm in a union of teachers in a purple area in a bright red state. So, like, yes, I I deal with a lot of progressives in my union, but I also deal with a lot of flaming reactionaries, often who aren't Trumpists, interestingly enough. Like, um, and and so you learn how to shift for both class and ideological presumptions and how to model minds. And I can tell you right now, I I one of the things that I think we you know that we can talk about the psychological problem of anti-politics, that maybe we should like ponder a bit is also just the inability to model other people's minds in ways that isn't just about getting getting a moral edge on them, because that doesn't really doesn't even help you beat them. Like winning a debate does not actually mean you politically debeat someone. I mean, like it in fact, it almost never means that actually. Um, so this idea that that's how you actually win in politics to me seems to be like fundamentally misguided and super common. Like at the same time, like why I think it's fundamentally misguided. We also see it all the time. Um and so you we a lot of leftists will, you know, you were talking about the leftists who became Trumpists. A lot of them thought initially, oh, we have to meet the middle class, uh, the not the middle class, the working class, although who they define as working class and who I define as working class, it's a little bit sketchy. Um uh but the working class, um, where they are, let's pretend to care about those social values. And one of the things that I see with that over and over again is if you tell people like that, you are more likely to become like them than they are to become like you.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:45

Um, whereas if I just go out to a to a normie religious conservative, I mean, I there are certain kinds of Trumpists. I'm not gonna try I'm not trying to win over the leadership of the GOP. That won't happen. Like, in fact, I I I kind of think you have to at least have a soft ideological cold war with them, no matter what. Like, um and and that's you know, that's that's if things uh are relatively peaceful, even. Um but when it comes to like the average conservative person that I meet, I am not out to alienate them uh immediately. In fact, you know, I'm looking for maybe the opposite of a wedge point. Um you know how we use cultural issues as a wedge point a lot. I mean, this is this is like so ubiquitous now we don't think about it, but I'm always looking for like where's the where's the moral appeal that can bring you on board to I'm not either trying to win people to my side, I just want them to get out of the way. If not, like I don't want them to feel like I'm a threat to them, unless I really am. Like sometimes I really am, but but I don't want the feel people to feel like I'm a threat to them um when it when there's no reason for them to view me that way, particularly if they're working class or or particularly if we have a you know we have a program we have to build together. Um and that is hard to get people to think like it's hard to inculcate that in a highly alienated society. One of the things that you said that's actually interesting to me, and I then I'll turn this back over to you to make your final statement. But you said you are pretty alienated from people you're on age, right? That you actually more engaged with I hear that a lot, which tells me that the social functions of people your own age are like kind of falling apart, like um, so uh you know, for for me, like that's a real question. That's uh and and while that might sound anti-political, that is a political question to me is how do we get people socialized enough that they can then know what mutual obligation is? Because if they don't understand personal mutual obligation and personal mutual benefit, uh how the fuck are they gonna ask understand political mutual benefit or political discipline? Or I mean, you know, I might be talking about a popular front versus the United Front all day. If you can't even understand how to discipline yourself politically, then that's like you might theoretically understand it, but it's still meaningless to you, right? Like, so I guess you know what do you see in regards to that? You know, take as long as you want to answer it because it's not really a question, it's just like here's this observation, do what you will.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:45

I mean, I there's like two different things I want to bring in here. I mean, one is they're both different kinds of philosophy. I think one is like German idealism and Hegel, and uh one is Nietzsche, and you know, I bring them in because neither one of them are leftists, um, but neither one of them are like easily fit into ideological camps. I mean, Hegel is probably something of a liberal, and Nietzsche is something of an anti-politics guy himself. But I mean, really, what I think there's a couple of key points, and that's that German idealism for me, one of the consistent things, and this is kind of a basic point, but one of the consistent things that Kant shows and the German idealists show is really the need for mutual recognition and subjectivity and having an awareness of like what the human subject is. And I mean, it really demonstrates that everyone is going to have a like radically different personal experience, but there is a shared character of like shared category of the human, and there has to be some mutual recognition, otherwise, we're just at war, basically. And I think I mean that's obviously a liberal idea, and I I would I would bring this in to say that this is one of the things I think is a very a strength of the liberal tradition is this idea of mutual recognition of a quality of like the human as a as a category, um, just the existence of a human at all that can can be discussed, and the fact that we need among humans, we need to have discourse, we need to recognize each other, we need to form groups, and it's gonna have to be like in a very complicated sense. It's gonna have to be a complicated relation. Um, you're basically you're never gonna find someone who disagrees with you. You're just not gonna find that, and you should you should not try to find that. On the other hand, um, when Nietzsche talks about relationships and friendships, one of the things that he points out, uh, at least by my reading, is that you really don't we don't really want compassion and we don't really want these kind of like blind virtues that we throw out there because they make us weaker and they're kind of self-serving uh at the same time. And so they're they're kind of like trying to they're trying to do this thing that's good for everyone, but it's actually good for no one, and it's not even good for us, even though we think it is. And so he he he does recommend kind of a version of radical honesty and holding your friends to account and uh you know radically engaging with them. And I don't know, these are the ideas that I keep in mind, and I'm and I'm keeping in mind, and I I guess it's kind of a gesture at an answer to the question of like community, because I think communities are so fractured now because there's just so much that we've taken for granted. Um, people just kind of assume that you're gonna have certain community members and you're gonna get along with them, but those aren't forged on a basis of real mutual recognition, or it's just a very empty kind of status, and then this causes all kinds of problems, which is like tribal politics that is also shallow, um, or it just completely destroys the political realm altogether, uh, which is really kind of an extension of discourse, the family, civil society, whatever. And if you don't have that, you don't have anything and everything's broken. So, yeah, I mean, I I think we need to have we need to have more honesty. That if if I that's one of the things I keep saying, and I just I just don't see anyone in the political arena or in the philosophical arena who is holding to that principle enough. And most of the people who talk about honesty, it it seems to me like a self-diluted uh deception of what honesty means. And so, you know, you have to have a radical perception of honesty. You have to say things that are dangerous, you have to say things especially that are dangerous to yourself. Um, you have to, you know, really try to figure out what is everything around you. And I feel like uh if everyone was doing that, if everyone was trying to do that more often, then community and engagement would naturally arise. That would just be something that would happen. And it would be fuller, it would um it would be something more. And I think what you're describing when you're working in a situation like in a union, people are forced to do that in some sense because they have a common interest, they have a goal. And so, you know, you can talk about things more honestly because you have that common goal. Um, but we don't really have anything that holds us in common anymore as a society, and so if you don't have anything in common with me, I can just like throw you to the side. And yeah, I don't know. It's just I I think there's an incoherence, there's an impoverishment of philosophy and politics. And I would harshly advocate for a re-enrichment of all those intellectual fields, and for normal people who you know don't have an interest in that or don't have time for that, they can benefit from it too. I mean, it it's not like these just pass over them. I mean, there's ways to you know engage it in this way without you know reading every philosophy book ever written. I mean, you can really gain something from this. I mean, there's truth to the idea that like Kant and the German idealists, they were like, you know, they were they were waging war on behalf of the common man against the scholars, right? I mean, they were they were they were they were making points that were supposed to be common truths that everyone could kind of intuitively understand, that uh for whatever reason we've lost. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, everything I'm saying now is kind of incoherent, but I just hope that people latch on to the idea of honesty, mutual recognition, um, engagement, and looking around for traits in people that uh, you know, they might not seem like they would agree with you, but in those deeper ways, you can you can find common ground with them. And we really have to transcend that because otherwise, I I'm uh like you, I'm taking the black pill otherwise, because otherwise everything is uh you know shallow and kind of accounted for and kind of a mathematical game. Um, and so I think we have to do that on that basis.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:31

But yeah, well, uh, thank you for coming on. I will link to both your audio and your YouTube um podcast as you're part of this grand new tradition of young people watching podcasts on YouTube that I participate in and don't understand. Um uh nonetheless, uh good on them. Um, so they'll find that in the show notes. And um I wish you luck on your project and uh probably you'll probably hear from me again sometime, and we'll have a more specific topic to talk about. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:08

Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate you having me on. All right.