Post-Liberalism’s Fade with Nicolas Villarreal

Politics keeps offering us drama in place of design. We sat down with Nicholas D. Vairo to chart how the post-liberal moment slid from grand promises into a Bonapartist reality: a leader-first spectacle with no plan to build or maintain the institutions that make a society work. The core insight isn’t just about ideology; it’s about capacity. Professional elites still run what functions, for better and worse, because no competing class has figured out how to reproduce competence at scale.

We unpack why Yarvin-style CEO fantasies and Deneen’s mixed-constitution nostalgia mirror historical dead ends. The French parallels are illuminating: attempts to jury-rig monarchs and blended constitutions collapsed into Bonapartism, not renewal. That’s where we are now—big talk, weak statecraft, and a movement that confuses obedience with order. Meanwhile, liberalism struggles with the deeper wound: a crisis of socialization. Without strong civil society—churches, associations, unions, schools that do more than sort—people can’t generate shared meaning or stable norms. That vacuum breeds nihilism and brittle politics.

We also go material. Neoliberal underinvestment hollowed America’s productive base, leaving the U.S. with high labor productivity but low capital intensity and a long productivity slump ahead. Tariffs and culture war won’t fix a capacity gap that took decades to create. China offers a counterexample—not as a model to copy, but as proof that disciplined investment and state competence matter more than performative revolt. On technology, we challenge fatalism: AI can de-skill or empower depending on the incentives and institutions wrapped around it. Design education for mastery and collaboration, and the tools raise the floor; design it for compliance and shortcuts, and skills atrophy.

Where does that leave the left? With work to do. We argue for pro-factional, member-driven organizations that build beyond elections, tie back into unions and tenant power, and actually teach people to run things. Less content, more construction. If post-liberalism’s disillusion teaches anything, it’s that there’s no substitute for institutions that build meaning and capacity together.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who’s wrestling with these questions, and leave a review telling us which institution you think we must rebuild first.

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

Transcript

Setting The Stakes: Post-Liberalism

C. Derick Varn 0:52

Hello and welcome to VaughnBlog. And we are here with Nicholas D. Viral. Nico is probably my longest, most repeated guest. So I don't know if you actually got the most guest spots, but you're up there, but you've also come on since the show started independently five years ago. And I've gotten to watch you grow intellectually. We are talking about whatever happened to post-liberalism, or what I would call post-liberalism a strange disillusion. And I'm not gonna say deaf, because I'm not even sure it died.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Like it just sort of like it's in the process, it's getting there.

C. Derick Varn 1:40

It just sort of melted away. And we're gonna talk about this in a time of bonapartism as super farce, as we were talking before the show. We're living in a time where like you can't predict how like I feel like the most satirical Thomas Pinchon novel feels a little bit undercooked now compared to what's actually happening. Like, you know, in fact, you know, crying lot seems a lot more plausible than what we're living through, and yet it's also all predictable. It's just what's unpredictable about it is how how stupid it's actually happening. It's like everything that I've ever thought might happen in this scenario, but dumber. And I just want to ask you before we get into this. I was told that Trumpism was gonna be a you know, it was gonna be an ideology of post-liberalism. And I don't see how it is, but what how do you respond to that? And I guess we have to define what post-liberalism is anyway.

Defining Post-Liberal Thinkers And Aims

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Sure. Well, I guess I mean in terms of what post-liberalism is, there's a bunch of different doctrines. In general, like like there's people like Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Denin, who have these ideas about like both of well, what they have in common is basically two things. They have this critique of liberalism, usually associated with like liberal elite institutions that are run by educated professionals, and they really don't like this like whatever tendencies come out of that, whatever ideologies are associated with that. And they also the reasons for that vary. Uh like Patrick Denin really doesn't like like the elitism aspect of it, of like the like that the underclass is being neglected in some way, although he has like this particular view of the underclass, like the views, like what they really wanted, like these eternal like truths that are obviously found in Catholic doctrine. And for Yarvin, it's just that they're like incompetent and bad and evil or whatever. And he like Yarvin wants a monarchy, Patrick Denin wants something he calls mixed constitution, which is just like elites that have more noblest or bleach and stuff like that, that actually represent the different classes in society, but aren't actually of necessarily of that closed classes. And the post-liberalism, the other thing it has in common, like all the different doctrines, is that they all embraced Trump, basically. They all embraced this idea of the necessity of just doing whatever the big guy in charge says, and that this was the problem with Trump's first administration, right? And that this and that kind of doing going along with this authority in whatever like excess or like uh what moment of exception that comes with it is what will get us out of this, out of liberalism. And but both of the like all of them weren't necessarily like meant to like they never spoke for Trump himself, obviously. Trump is like like we've been talking like he's kind of like a Bonapartist figure, and as I wrote in like this unpublished article, that like the the post-liberal thinkers are all kind of like have these historical kind of analogies in the way they operate to like the the figures that preceded Bonaparte a bit, like Jarvin's idea of monarchy is very similar to the monarchy of like Louis Felipe, the king of France. Basically, the parliament, it was full of all like the bourgeois bankers and stuff like that. They just decided he's gonna be in charge. And it was very arbitrary and nobody really liked it, but he was put like the garment's whole thing is like, oh, we'll have a group of shareholders that decide who's in charge or whatever. And that's basically what happened in France. And everyone hated it, it did not go well, and he got chased out of the country like the Bourbons before him. And then Denin's whole thing. I mean, the the provisional government after uh Louis Philippe got kicked out was very much in this mold of Danin's idea of mixed constitution, even down to like the social Catholic teachings. Uh Lamartine, the guy who star headed the the provisional government, he's even like spoke to that and was very like uh basically everything that Danine wanted was in this guy and his rhetoric. And he failed spectacularly. He got like 0.25% in the presidential election when Bonaparte won. And obviously the Second French Republic did not end well. The party of order, which was composed of like the moderate Republicans and the monarchists, and basically the party of the bourgeoisie, they really just represented uh bourgeois interests and cracked down on all the left wing and the proletariat in order to maintain that. So all of them kind of what they have is a bonaparte, but what they want is like these other pre professional uh uh like liberalism that existed but also failed because they don't know about its history of failures. They they they never bring those things up.

C. Derick Varn 7:40

Well, uh, you know, this is one of the things that I find so interesting for people who are supposedly offering a pre-Enlightenment model, they're all pulling to early liberal enlightenment enlightenment models that were on that could not compete with bourgeois parliamentarianism, basically. You know, I guess Danine is a little bit harder to pin down because for all of his complaints about liberalism, he basically offers a liberal version of Catholic distributism. That's how I've always interpreted what he's doing, yeah. Which is awfully close to integralism, which is awfully close to Italian fascism, but like he's not gonna say that. But I you know these people were all the rage four or five years ago, and even during the early Biden administration, they were big influences on the national conservative movement. Another movement that seems to have mostly dissolved in light of Trump returning. Yeah, I I find that interesting how much dissolution of Trump won. I mean, we could talk about like this a dissolution of all the counter forces on him, like Ivanka and the old the old Republican establishment, but there's also a dissolution of key parts of Trumpist ideology this time around. Like we are we are more with a purely demagogic figure with no clear ideology whatsoever.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

I mean, this is explicit where like Yarvin came out and said just a few weeks ago that, like, yeah, everything failed when like Doge and Trump didn't blow up everything and start over uh in like the first week or something. But it it was like but he was cheering it on for way longer than that. He like at at well, at his heart, Curtis Yarvin is just a partisan hack, but it really became clear that like people were not buying into this anymore because of just how stupid everything Trump was doing was. I mean, the trade war, the stuff that the way that ICE is doing it now, and Jerome Powell going after him. It's just the most stupid things that anyone who has any awareness of what's going on would understand. Even well, even the Epstein stuff too, and now like people like Majority Taylor Green are disillusioned. And I think this is also slightly why people like Nick Fuentes are kind of picking up in popularity among these people, among you know, like Republican staffers and in that type of milieu. Because like the the people they turn to as like intellectual heavyweights and and guiding lights basically brought them to where they are, and where they are isn't working.

Bonapartism And Failed French Analogies

C. Derick Varn 10:38

And that's basically you know, not to be too speculative, we can come back to your article here, but it does feel like I'm either gonna watch JD Vance or Marco Rubio eventually do a Khrushchev moment after uh after Mark, yeah, after Marco Ruby or JD Vance like bury a Khrushchev one another. I'm not sure who's who in that analogy. But I mean it it it feels like that. I mean, really does feel like that. You're just like, oh, the next person's gonna come from this regime that it's probably one of the kiss-ass toadies now, but they're going to pivot away from most of this. Now, Vance has doubled down on the racial nationalism, so ironically, even though all the figures of the alt-right have gone away, they seem to have one amongst the under 20-something weirdos in the GOP, but that also seems to be alienating a whole lot of people from the GOP.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Yeah. I mean, those it's ironic because those are the like the some of the really unpopular stuff, like the ice kind of crackdowns and whatnot, are the stuff that these people like, what those people like in particular, and will double down defend. On the other hand, when you look at people like Rubio, and it's still just all about like we gotta get crushed these left-wing governments in South America or whatever.

C. Derick Varn 12:03

It's just neoconservatism and one and and one R2 hemispheres.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

Like, yeah. So it it's looking pretty bleak for them. And honestly, like this is like I saw this pretty early. Like, once Liberation Day happened, I was like, This these people are discredited forever. Like, basically, the the post-liberal thinkers, because they in particular, like in a world where like young people in particular aren't being socialized very well, that these people basically socialized generation of young right-wingers to just obey the authority at the top and never think for themselves, and that's why all these things are being allowed to happen, basically.

C. Derick Varn 12:52

Uh what I'm what I'm more interested in in some ways is like how deep is this? Like, if if like, for example, we all know that JD Vance will uh has the charisma of a pile of dog shit, but but he is smart and he is a weasel, yeah. And you know, because we're talking about a guy who's now picking up every talking point. I mean, he he sounds like he's like actually trying to go further than Trump and and his justifications, but he sounds slimy doing it even to a lot of the conservative base. And it also seems like you know, when you see pictures of of everything recently, it seems like Rubio is closer to the king. And I don't normally do criminology on our own country, but given Trump's ego, being closer to him in pictures and stuff actually is an indication of something.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Well, I feel like the way that all the things are going on internationally, one of the at least one of those threads is gonna backfire on Rubio, and I don't think that's gonna last forever.

C. Derick Varn 13:58

Yeah, I well, I feel like most of these people have a thousand little bombs to go off, and particularly with like you know, NATO sending six countries forces to Greenland to potentially defend against us, including the UK, with with yes, they're still kowtowing the Trump as much as they like and agree, but you did have NATO commanders saying they'd seize every military base the US had in Europe if it happened. And there are reports of generals, you know, when asked to drop a plan about Greenland saying flat out the the you know the joint chief saying we don't want to do that. Now, one thing I'd say is like that latter bit probably can't be true. We know the United States has a contingency plan for invading every single country on earth, and I don't mean that they would actually do it. I mean, like we had a hypothetical plans for invading Canada in World War I and World War II, and we probably have them now. Uh and furthermore, as today is when we're speaking, I'll just date this because it'll come out about a month later, and who knows what's gonna happen in a month. This is on the 12th of January. We have all the big talk and bluster about Mexico, but also the US is formally allowing Mexico to ship crew to Venice to Cuba, despite also having warships outside of Cuba. So who the hell know?

SPEAKER_02 15:23

They did. I didn't see that. I thought they were that was Rubio's big thing of trying to cut that off.

C. Derick Varn 15:28

It is, but there is there today. There was a conversation between Steinbaum and Trump that went well, and then all of a sudden the US was like the ships can go through. We don't, I don't know how long that'll stay. I mean, but I I guess this this play this this betrays the point. Um Yarvin more than Danin. I mean, like yar Yarvin A has proved himself to be a lot more stupid than his bluster back when Mark Fisher was obsessed with him. Um I didn't know about that.

SPEAKER_02 16:01

Oh, yeah. Well, I think I did at some point, but I forgot about it.

C. Derick Varn 16:04

Back before anyone knew who Yarvin was, back when he still published under Minchus Mobug. Like, like they're like tons of because of the land connection, probably. Yep, it is through Nick Land. And honestly and seriously, Fisher and critiquing these people when nobody knew who they were actually made them slowly part of the mainstream of Republican thought. Um be careful who you critique, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Well, I I wouldn't give him too much credit there. They definitely had a lot of sway just through like a bunch of different channels.

C. Derick Varn 16:36

Um, TL being a big one, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

But there's also like the disillusionment with rationalism, and that they those people were involved in that. But yeah, the Theo and lots of other people. And but but and this is like they really like you you read Yarvin's stuff, which are I I wouldn't necessarily recommend because it's not very good. And he you can tell why people were attracted to it back then, because he was saying the Iraq war, it may it actually did hit in a different way.

Trumpism Without Ideology

C. Derick Varn 17:16

I mean, I remember when I first read Letters to the Young Progressive, I think it was around it was right when it came out. Oh really? And yeah, and I was like, huh, this actually does kind of hit if you are watching these neocons do neocon things, and then you know, you're coming out of this American exceptionalism. I mean, the thing about Yarvin is he he's bred a bunch of like reactionaries like Arun McIntyre who like run a Lester McIntyre, Evola, uh Carl Smith into a blender, but all these people were just standard fucking neocons until 2020. Like, and I just think a lot of them, you know, uh in the last three or four weeks, a lot of them were like, you know, there are no adults in a room, you know. I see I saw a lot of them turn to that. Now they're they're back on defending the dear leader, but I think I think the cracks are actually showing even now. It's just now that there's blood in the water, they have to swarm. And what is happening is you know, and although predictably, because we live in a very anti-political country, and also most people's ideas are stupid, including the elites. You you see strong reactions in the first year where it looks like, oh, there's gonna be emerging Republican hegemony. I mean, you you remember this with Biden too. People were like, Gen Z is gonna be the most left-wing generation ever, 2024 comes around, they're gonna be the most right-wing generation ever. 2025 ends, and it's like, oh, the Democrats are becoming popular again in the midterms. And I'm like, hasn't that been the cycle since I don't know the 60s?

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Well, I mean, but this there is something different this time in in like the way that young people are swinging back and forth, in that like it this is the reason why post-liberalism became a thing, is that liberalism had in many ways genuinely failed.

C. Derick Varn 19:28

Yeah, it still has, yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:29

Yes. And it it's like this it and this is goes back to things I've written about before about like that there's a crisis of socialization, of people not being able to be shaped by institutions in the way that like you know, Althuser talked about of state ideological apparatuses, that there's a failure of those to operate the socialized people into like the citizens subjects to actually reproduce our liberal democratic capitalism. And that and that comes with a whole bunch of different things that comes with like the nihilism of like modern society, the like the whole like the people not being able to the like find like get a life to the total atomization of people from each other. All those things are connected, and liberalism has no answer to them because this is uh I remember there's might might have been Matt Glace is involved in this somehow. I don't quite remember. But like of one of those dust ups of like, you know, somebody, some reactionary saying that you need to give people like meaning in their lives, and then some liberal centrist going, well, I think people should be able to like cope with whatever they want. And that's Like the the people should be able to come up with whatever they want, but they can't right now because the like the the creation of meaning in society isn't supposed to be a voluntaristic thing. It is a mandatory thing that it was recognized as mandatory in all previous societies. Now you don't have necessarily have to have a particular content to that, but you just you have to have it. And without that, things sort of begin to fall apart. And I I talk about this basically as a crisis of just like when people talk about a crisis of meaning, I think of it as a crisis of like actually the production of semantic content. Because without civil society, without institutions to be involved in, interpolated by, and to be involved in the process of interpolating others, you don't articulate ideas, you don't, and you don't have like an orthodoxy or a set of signs and other ideas to draw from to article to further articulate things. So you don't, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 21:50

Yeah, I I want to push on you a little bit, not because I disagree with you, but because I think if we just limit it to state or ideological apparatuses, we do have a problem because it's it's a larger problem than that. Like if it was just to break down apparatuses, other apparatuses could naturally emerge to take their place. Well, we we're not seeing that, and the reason why we're not seeing that is I'm not gonna use the a word because you don't like it, but that's alienation for those of you who don't follow the debates here. But I I do sincerely think that you're dead on when you say there's a crisis of socialization, which means that not only I mean you basically this in and of itself, not dealing with all the external crises we have, you have a crisis of ideological reproduction, you have a crisis of sociological reproduction, and you have a material crisis underlying that. The free ones are downstream of large capital and geopolitics and ways that make them precarious, and their internal bureaucratic apparatuses have expanded to a degree that would make the Soviet Union at its worst blush. And we've been told that was never going to happen under capitalism. That's just blatantly untrue. Like, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

I mean, this is kind of why it felt like for a lot of people that post-liberalism had a point because all of its critiques were at like this educated, professional, elite institutions, which are basically every the only institutions left that function in society are elite prof or not necessarily elite, but professional educated like educated professionals run them, all of them. The schools, yeah, even the ones that aren't schools, like yeah, no, the and the uh nonprofits, the news organizations, everything. And this naturally, like Jarvin gets all this whole idea of the cathedral of why this group that's all socialized in institute like edge in liberal education the same way, why do they all have the same ideas? Well, because they have that same ideology that they're all trained in of professionalism, uh liberal uh in particular in the liberal democratic context. And that like everybody who's outside of that, even for many people inside of it, this presents all sorts of problems, practical problems, individual problems, and political problems. And this was the promise of post-liberalism. But the problem of post-liberalism was they didn't recognize that like all their solutions come from like this period, like are things that were tried before professionalism was a thing.

C. Derick Varn 24:37

And the liberalism and all failed utterly.

Crisis Of Socialization And Meaning

SPEAKER_02 24:39

Yes, because they don't recognize their own liberalism and the way that like liberalism failed basically everywhere before professionalism was a thing, except for the US. And this is important because it relates back to this question of why is there a crisis of socialization. The US like had a particular civil society with like the amount of like churches and political groups and whatever all sorts of associations between people that had sprung up basically from its very beginning. And basically, what we saw over the course of US and global history is these institutions like basically slowly dissolve over time, and nothing comes up to replace them. And this is the thing of like liberalism, this is my theory of it, is that basically you need resources to like create these civil society groups that in order to reproduce themselves. And liberalism, liberal democratic capitalism will not assign those resources necessarily. But as that slowly winds down, those like you'll the death rate of institutions is much higher than like the birth rate, and they'll eventually just all die out.

C. Derick Varn 26:05

And so there's no I don't think it's an accident that most of the the ideological apparatuses to use your terminology, well uh through Sarah's terminology that we built and marketized and corporatized and professionalized were mostly pre-modern. By that I mean churches, civic civic groups which were and I don't mean NGOs here, but civic groups like the Koanas are the Shriners of the Masons or whatever that came out of guild societies, universities which are pre-modern. I mean, they're not you know they they go back to the eighth or ninth century in in in the west and like a thousand years BCE in in in Asia, so you know it's uh these are institutions that were not fully dissolved, and I I often think even Marx was a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

I mean, he predicted he predicted this, but he didn't talk like I don't think he he thought we'd allow capitalism to get so mature that it would actually be able to fully cannibalize and dissolve all of all those things, and he also didn't think some of them dissolving were bad, but but he didn't uh this is the one of the big problems of Marxism, I think, is that it came about right before like professionalism fully took over Western societies, like the in like literally the decades, like like 20 years before, basically. And it like he grew up in I mentioned this before a little bit of how and like it started in Prussia, and he was like, This is like the worst despotism ever, and there's no way like this is this is a thing of the past, and it's like this is not the future, but it was the future, but not in the particular Prussian way, right? Everyone adopted it because once they realized that they could use it to stabilize liberal societies, and because when you like if you look at the French revolutions, all of them involve some defections of the armed forces, and once you have a professionalized military officer corps, you can shut that down for the most part.

C. Derick Varn 28:25

And yeah, which I tell people when everyone tells me, like, oh, you know, if there's something in America, 30 like 30-40 percent of the troops support Trump, like and 60 don't, and very little of the brash really cares. So, you know, even with the hexeth person uh purges, I doubt that they really care. Yeah, so I don't think that means what you think it means. And then when you see when they try to create their own forces, like I've mentioned ICE are or this new DHS, they are so obviously unprofessional that now you have what I like to call the the reduction problem, you know, just like when you when you cook a soup, right? The the insanity, but all of a sudden the devotion gets stronger and stronger because all the other elements evaporate away. So, you know, long-term, relatively stayed conservatives who were probably even sympathetic to Trump won and very much hated Biden and were supporting him in the first few months until whatever happened with Doge happened. The the problem that they've had is while the Trump Trump has mad king vision, all those visions tend to resolve in weaker institutions and they can't replace the administrative apparatus and they can't deliver on the promises. So what do I mean by that? Well, it's clear that the tariffs aren't gonna bring enough money in to offset spending to really get down the national the national debt. And why do you care about the national debt? Because, well, if you want to keep it's not because the government can run out of money, it's because, however, they can run out of the ability to get people to buy their bonds, which would drop them from Forex, basically. And once that's happened, the dollar is just paper, you know, because what you're proving is the full faith from credit of the planet is no longer with you. Sorry, MMTers, you're not wrong in the first instance, but in the second instance, you really are.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

Yeah, they are wrong that in in the sense that they always think that the US has more fiscal room than it really does, right?

C. Derick Varn 30:40

Exactly. You know, like the the they draw from the idea that that the US can't run out of money because they supply it through and they can demand it through taxes, to pretend that the US is like an an internally consistent autarky where the government's also the only major purchaser, which is not really true.

SPEAKER_02 31:01

You know, I have this line in an upcoming article for Cosmonaut about some of the political economy of this, and it's like the Chinese, when they're like faced with the the trade negotiations, they actually can embody like the Keynesian maximum of like anything we can do, we can afford. If they wanted to spend more, they could do it and actually use all that excess capacity. But the US is the inverse is not true. All the things we can afford are not things we can necessarily do. And this is a problem that not many people have really reckoned with, except in like sort of a crude way of like some of the conservatives talking about the debt 10 years ago. They don't do that anymore. But it's like you the US doesn't have the capacity anymore because of systemic underinvestment under neoliberalism, and this is this is gonna create this is all of Trump's the things Trump's doing right now with the Fed with tariffs, he just announced new tariffs about 25% on anyone trading with Iran, which who knows what that means.

C. Derick Varn 32:06

I who know how you even prove that.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Yeah, well, they they'll just assert it.

C. Derick Varn 32:11

I mean yeah, also we know they will, but we also know that they're likely to have the Supreme Court, you know, they might serve Trump, but they serve capital more.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Yeah, and they might genuinely shut down the tariff stuff, which would be interesting. Uh probably good for the economy. Well, definitely good for the economy, but we'll see what how Trump reacts to that. But this, like, I mean, to go back to post-liberalism for a second here. I mean, yeah, the they have no alternative. That's the basic thing.

C. Derick Varn 32:45

And what is they have no way to fit the form of elite either? I mean, this is the other thing where I hear I would hear like a Arun McIntyre talk about, you know, we need the lions and not the foxes. And I'm like, you have a big fat fox on your throne, you doofus. Like, you don't know how to tell the difference.

SPEAKER_03 33:08

Well, it's it is go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

I mean, did you read Yarvin's most recent blog about how we need to embrace democratic centralism? Or not we as in the right. Yes, they need to embrace democratic centralism in order to create a party that's on a gamified Silicon Valley app in order to get people to vote to end democracy. And it's just so absurd that like because well, it's it's really ironic that they are literally like 50 years behind the left in all these debates because they don't have no, like they look at China like, oh, look at that strong Democratic Centralist Party, not looking at the like long, long history of every failed sect and ML party in the West that tried this exact thing, maybe without the app. I don't know if that'll make that much of a difference.

C. Derick Varn 33:56

Well, we have parties trying the app too, though, so you know it's okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:59

Yeah, that's yeah, nowadays that they do that.

C. Derick Varn 34:03

I mean, this is the thing. One of the things that this is really a case to me is like Patrick Denine is a smart man. I actually don't think Curtis Jarvin is that smart of a man. I do think Patrick Denine is.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

So he's uh dumb like a fox. He's he he knows how to attack like the liberals and the neocons. He is zero self-awareness, is his thing.

unknown 34:27

Right.

C. Derick Varn 34:30

And it looks to me what they're gonna be left with is a bunch of groper trolls who they're not just not professionals in the sense of going through professional education, they're also not even properly proletarianized, and that most of them have never had a fucking job. And so you're left with this with this deracinated group of people who are uh to to pull from Joseph Tainter a little bit, my favorite guy to talk about, who are maybe smart in one or two elements, although the CEOs tend to be smart in one key element. I think I often disagree with Ed Zitron a lot, but he is right about this. One of the reasons why the CEOs survive Persian changes of expertise and specialty is their specialty is conning people. Yeah, like that's how they got there. And so eventually that's all you have left. And between that and financialization of incentives, you have not just in shittification, which comes from you know, actually somewhat cunning, if vulgar shifts of collecting rents that Corey Doctor describes, but you also have in shidification in that you don't really have anyone who understands how to run anything at the head of anything.

SPEAKER_02 35:59

Yep. I mean, this is I mean, this goes back to like the breakdown of socialization, right? Is that there's like the the status quo, the explicit ideologies of like before post-liberalism, before Trump, all of the explicit ideologies were stupid, but everyone was trained and knew their job and knew what they were supposed to do in a practical way, the system reproduced itself.

C. Derick Varn 36:25

This is to reproduce itself despite the fact the idea. Although I think I think Nico, I want to ask you about this. One of the things I started seeing even with neoconservatism is a lot of these people started believing their own ideological Kool-Aid, which is something you should never really do. I'm not saying people like, oh, you believe Marxism, yeah, I do, but like like I'm not trying to fool you guys with some kind of concocted ideology. If my, you know, if I have an idea, ideological apparatus, I try to have it approach truth. But and maybe everyone believes that. But the problem that you have is if you if you have to believe lies enough to sell them to the public, and we saw this with I think I saw this with the Bush, the George W. Bush administration, eventually you start acting like those lies are true and they affect your decisions in ways that are disastrous. Like, and I wonder what if that's one of the things you know, the two things I got from your talk about post-liberalism is where are their elites gonna come from if they think the current elites are so bad? I mean, is it just a counterform of the current elites? Because if you like know, you know, the deeper history of these debates, if you read someone like Sam Francis, who was talking about this in the 90s, he just thought you get the middle class to produce an angrier, more disgruntled counter-elite, but still had most of the same skills, and you would get close to the kind of nationalism you wanted. And while he would admit that he didn't think that white nationalism could ever be dominant in the United States, that it would have a lot of the same things, and the white nationalists would be happy, except for the most like genocidal ones. That was Sam Francis and Leviathan and his enemies, and today you're just like, Y'all deracinated society too much for that to work. You're not gonna get uh some uh a mass middle class base like that.

SPEAKER_02 38:19

Go ahead. So, this is the interesting thing, right? So when Yarvin is talking about like creating a new democratic centralist party, he doesn't talk about who's at the top of that party. It's kind of like goes without saying that it's whoever owns the app or whatever, it's literally just Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and it's like that's stupid. You're not that that's not an actual elite that knows how to run anything, you just think that because of the Yeah, look at Alice Carp. Yeah, well, they he genuinely believes that they they they bought into all that bullshit, and like they because that is it. That that's true. Yarvin's whole theory was that like CEOs like is a is a type of authority that works in practice and whatever. So obviously they should be the ones in charge, and these like Silicon Valley CEOs have it works in practice. They don't have the practical knowledge.

C. Derick Varn 39:07

Don't it don't even listen to them anyway. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 39:10

Like they don't they are not an elite that can actually run things in that way. And Danine, I'm not exactly sure if how he articulates how you create this new aristocracy. It might it I get the sense that it's just supposed to be like educated Catholics or something. But it's it there is no real plan from these people, or especially and there is no real actually doing it of creating a new elite, and they're basically hitting a dead end with that because they don't even recognize really that it's a problem because in some sense the elite is implicit in like their ideas, it's just like the it's people, it's generally whoever's like them, right? People in their particular strata, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 39:51

It is it is a projection of uh of narc of I mean this in a non we use narcissism too much, but it is a narcissistic projection of yourself, it's the self-exception where you think you are an aristocrat. So if you had a people who'd look like you, I mean to be fair, I would probably live in a society rather live in a society run by Patrick Denin than run by Curtis Arvin, because I don't really want venture capitalist risk seeking people with a pension for amphetamines to be in charge of society. But at the same at the same token, I mean when they talk about the virtues of these elites, honestly, their undermanagement has it more than they do. And by the, you know, if you look at like I always talk about people always talking about PMC, and I'm like, yeah, but look at the fire part of the PMC, but then I'm like, well, look at what like liberal management. Managers do they actually are? I mean, they don't advocate for discipline in general society. This is actually something conservatives are right about. But they are disciplined people. Whereas, like some of these CEOs and a lot of these conservatives are completely a disciplined people. They reflect the society decay that they're complaining about, look at their base.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

Like I mean, this is this is also like why, like they because they don't re see any need for like that for people to actually have that discipline or like do think for themselves to do what's right or whatever. They just buying into that cult of the supreme leader or whatever, a CEO, monarch, whatever. They just they like the the way that actual organizations with a strong executive actually work well is when the underlings are all like trained to do what they know is right and have strong responsibility and all those sorts of things. And that's exactly the opposite of what these people have basically been telling the the un the new class of underlings for the uh government that they just need to be do what do what they're told and not think about it.

China, Cultural Revolution, And Elites

C. Derick Varn 41:58

I mean, one of the things I was thinking about about you know your article is this point that you made about what could work, work kind of worked in China, but only through failing, which was the cultural revolution in the collective period that happened after it, which did fail. I'm I agree with you, it utterly failed. I think it may have my hot take that one other person I know agrees with is the cultural revolution actually probably prevented the civil war, but it doesn't change the fact that the Russification of intellectuals did produce a peasantry that was able to be proletarianized more easily, and it did it did more evenly distribute skills across society, but that in dismantling the apparatuses that supported those intellectuals, the state could not function and thus production could not function, and everything started falling apart, particularly in urban areas. Like this was doable and in communes on the countryside, but if you looked at the chaos it like brought in Shanghai and Beijing, it was not a sustainable way to go about things, which I actually agree with, even though I think you and I both would are def are defenders of you know the collective period of China, even though we both think it was not maintainable in the conditions in which it existed in, right? Like yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Well, I the reason that I in particular brought it up, right, is because I think that there is some structural similarities between the politics of post-liberalism and the politics of the cultural revolution.

C. Derick Varn 43:49

Okay, like the the what they say about what the post-liberals are always accusing liberals of doing. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

But it's like but it's like China in that that period until I guess now is probably like is a window into the future because they have had educated professionals not for a century or two, but for millennia. Yeah. And that creates like this cultural knowledge among everyone in the society, even like the the most isolated peasants, about what these things mean, about what these institutions mean and what they are. And it's why Mao was able to get so much support for these like recsifications of the intellectuals and stuff, because people recognized that the schools, like getting people to go to a school in a city was the way to progress and like get a c higher class position, uh, which was also kind of against the ethos of what the the revolution was supposed to be about, and but was also like a continuation of like this ancient kind of practice of the civil service.

C. Derick Varn 45:00

I think that's interesting. I think about a there's two books by Francis Fukuyama that no one reads, which is the political order book and the clinopology order and decay. They're actually very I mean, they're they're not perfect, but they're very interesting books. And he makes a point that he thinks is good, but I actually think is an interesting problem. Like he said, one of the reasons why the West got the way it was is we had a professional class that could not have families because it was quartered off in religious institutions, and I was like, Yeah, until you know Protestants happen, then I go as a shit. And the other thing is they weren't really professionals in that that they were they were an appendage of either seniory or manorialism, depending on where you were at. And I guess I can explain that for my listeners. They were either dependent on lords or they're dependent on people tied to the land that they were on, so they still had serfs. So the long and short of it though, is that you had an artist in class that had professional things and guilds, but they weren't you didn't have to be educated and they were family-based, and you had the other functions of the professional kind of bifurcated in Europe in the religious orders, and while religious orders existed and had academic functions in Asia too, that was not the primary generator of uh of courtly professionals to be an aristocrat in most Asian countries. I'm not just talking about China uh any of the Chinese countries, but even in like the the Shila dynasty in in Korea or ancient go uh goryo or any of that, there was a whole class of people, and the the Marxist in Asia had to make a decision about whether or not they were class enemies or not. Juse, for example, decided they weren't. If you don't if you don't know what the little paintbrush on the flag of the DPRK is about, it is about incorporating the the intellectual and like bringing them down a peg, but they're they they were they were considered acceptable, whereas the monarchists and capitalists were not. And in China the the intellectual was a bigger problem. I mean, it really was a bigger problem, and and as you say in the article, and I'm a little bit hesitant to talk a bit all about it because you haven't published it yet, so people can't read it. But it is very true that like the the peasants weren't wrong that these professionals were a problem for them, like and the proletariat in China was developing. I mean, there was a proletariat in China before the revolution, but a lot of it got massacred explicitly by the Guamandong and and then the wars. I mean, one of the reasons why the Chinese Communist Party had to say the peasantry was the most revolutionary party, which they did a lot in different time periods, was also because the proletariat was literally massacred and not big enough to be a significant portion of their base. And I bring that up because, like, I do think there is like there's a certain there's a certain class continuity in China that exists from this collective period out of the cultural revolution that doesn't exist in the West anywhere. Like maybe some places in Latin America where professionals are more part of small town life and they're still kind of you know organically part of small towns. I've I've read some studies on that, but everywhere else professionals are pretty much removed from laboring life. That seems to be ending, but they don't have a like it's also pretty clear they don't have a means to deal with that, like not just not just liberals, but post-liberals don't either. And the the other thing is these guys don't seem to believe in modes of production, are even not even in that sense, like they don't even really seem to believe in materialism at all, like they're hyper voluntarist.

SPEAKER_02 49:17

Yeah, I mean, this is they are totally enmeshed in like bourgeois ideology, the Arvard, especially. I mean, Danin has I mean, Catholic Catholicism is kind of like its own thing, but it is still very much like they they try to LARP as like aristocrats, as like aristocratic thinkers, but they're not. They are they are specifically bourgeois thinkers that can't recognize that about themselves.

C. Derick Varn 49:43

In some ways, they're kind of degenerate bourgeois thinkers too.

unknown 49:47

But go ahead.

AI, De-Skilling, And Education Incentives

SPEAKER_02 49:48

I mean, yeah, because they are like totally cosplaying LARPing, and they need like they if if they were smart, if they could recognize what they were talking about, then I think that like they would have to be more materialist about it. They would have to think about things like modes of production and in a Marxist kind of way. But this is like they totally believe that capitalism, like all the myths about capitalism basically, except for like the the stupid popular ones about like meritocracy or or whatever. I mean, McGarvin might believe some of that, but Danin doesn't. But they do believe in some sort of end of history kind of idea of capitalism and liberalism, and and to a certain extent liberalism, although they won't have been that. And the the problem is that they because they can't recognize these things about the professionals and liberal democratic capitalism. I mean, because they like when Garvin's talking about the cathedral, he still only ever talks about it in terms of like he he doesn't think about it in terms of like institutions as like a the material reproduction of institutions. He thinks about it purely as like some sort of mimetic science of the reason that evil left-wing ideas come out is because they are more structurally able to reproduce within these institutions of power, it almost like a Foucaultan sort of thing, that's totally idealist, totally like not grounded in anything more specific or material. And I think this is why none of these people are going to be able to uh think their way out of this these problems that they're faced with now. And also why I think that there's big opportunities for the left in the near future, so long as like everyone doesn't get like arrested and shot by Trump. That to take it to come up with a theory of these politics of like what how can we think develop an actual critique of educated professionals in a way that isn't stupid? That would be a good place to start.

C. Derick Varn 51:56

I mean, to me, uh, you know, I think leftists have to do this too, and I actually do think a lot of the PMC critiques, unfortunately, are also stupid. Just yeah, they are like because what they assume, and this is because of the nature of where of where most leftists are in society, is that the values of the PMC are the values of academia because every PMC person supposedly goes through academia, which I one a look at the fire, it's not totally true, and B in so much that it is true, the problem that you have is the humanities majors are over assuming that everyone acts like the people they know in academia, and that the the mind discipline of academia uh is primarily about wokeness or whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_02 52:46

It goes way beyond that, huh? It goes way beyond that, right?

C. Derick Varn 52:50

No, I think it absolutely does. Have you you've read have you read uh Just Mitt's Disciplined Minds? Yes, yeah, that's a great example. Yeah, that book wakes you up to like, no, this is true in sciences too, and how it affects the way you think, and like if we had proletarian scientists, they would not think like bourgeois scientists are even calling them bourgeois scientists is actually not fair, they would not think like professional like professional scientists, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they would be untrained, you know. And we live in an era where ironically the technology that is is happening down. I I think you and I have talked a lot about this, but I think it it comes back here. This technology that we currently live under with AI, the the internet in general, uh is de-skilling us in a massive way, but it didn't have to, right? It could do the opposite if you if you had people work in a habitas that would train them to use it correctly and also incentivize against human laziness, which you know, I know it's always weird to socialists don't think about incentives. Like, no, it's one of the only things I think about because I've learned that money isn't that great of an incentive at a certain point.

SPEAKER_02 54:06

Yeah, no, I mean the thing about money is it like is a is an incentive, right? Is that if you're not like pretty good at something, if you're not the best in a competitive environment, it may not even be worth it to try to do something for money, right? If with if there are costs involved, and that can discourage a lot of people from even trying to do something to develop skills.

C. Derick Varn 54:29

But we've seen a lot of the entertainment industry basically completely collapse for this reason. Like, yeah, no, you know, not just from AI, but also just from like power law, you know, like like yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

But I mean, if you take the approach, and with this is like the one of the good things about AI is that I've like I've been able to build tools that have been extremely useful for me and my personal life. Like you can now just build whatever software you want for your personal use, basically. I made an app this week or last week that I can use to edit the web pages HTML CSS on mobile, which is kind of the there are ways to do that with like uh developer browsers or stuff, but this makes it easy, and then you can download it as an ePub, and which is something that I always do for putting in e-reader apps to read out loud. And there's no like there's no extension or app that just lets you do that right now, and now I can do that. So it's like this these technologies can radically increase your agency, even if they can't necessarily make you a lot of money unless you're running a scam or something.

C. Derick Varn 55:39

Um the MIT the MIT studies actually when you talk about skilling and de-skilling, and I've been pushing back on me. Uh, and this I'll push back on you guys since drawn heads. That like it does have use that can make you smarter if you are already fairly well trained in classical ways, which was also true for Google. People have like I've talked about this before AI, that like people who are well trained in conventional literacy good use Google better than just Google it because the people you were telling you just Google it don't know how to word the question in a way to get Google to give them back good results, even before in shittification. And I think that's important to kind of know and understand, right? Like, but so the MIT study that I'm thinking about, I can't remember the specific one to cite it on air. I might probably look it up. Was like it does lead to it does lead to skills and cognitive decline in lazy use cases. It doesn't, if you know how to use it well. The thing is, no one's like like I have designed education apps with for my own personal use or for the use in my department with AI. I have streamlined lessons that I've written and been able to level them up or down in vocabulary based on need with AI. It is good at that. When people like, oh, you'd never use an education. I'm like, you gotta check it, you can't trust it. But like, if I need to like, if I have a kid who can't read, I can now level a text down to where they to where it can start to, and we can work them up where I could do that manually, and it would take me weeks and weeks and weeks, and I have too many students to do it. Now it takes me five minutes. If you know we had a more Chinese way of thinking about AI, we'd be trying to get it more efficient, which we're currently not, and we wouldn't have to be worrying about this, that, or the other. And people ask, well, why don't we try to get it more efficient? I'm like, I literally think part of it is a developmental boondoggle, is part of why we don't like like the data centers or whatever are are making money right now, and inefficiency would cut down on but you know, increases the need for data centers. And I know the market's supposed to fix that, but it doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 58:01

So well, when it does, it probably won't be pretty for the a lot of those companies, uh particularly like the uh Oracle and a couple of those. But it's uh like yeah, I mean there was one post going around I saw that uh was talking about like how using AI will like destroy your writing skills. I use AI all the time, and I wrote by myself, not with AI, 50,000 words last year. I keep track because I am obsessive. And it's like you can use all these things and not let your skills atrophy like that, which is it one, it it is there is an aspect of personal choice, but there's also an aspect of institutional incentives and how people are socialized. Because right now, kids growing up and going through high school and college, all of that is just designed to be an adversarial disciplining system. And in that kind of situation, of course, they're just going to use it to get through, and just because it's just about presenting the right appearances, the right signs, the right just just to get through it and get a job and live. And that produces de-skilling in that situation.

C. Derick Varn 59:17

Yeah, well, I mean, I've talked about this too, is like the one of the one of the problems that you have in Western education is that it's two missions are at direct odds with each other, and and you know, contradictions with capitalism, blah blah blah. But it is because we have one mission which is to educate the general public in a way that allows them to be more functional citizens and enrich themselves. That is part of our mission explicitly, and we have a second mission that is totally antithetical to that, which is to sort these people into so that so that administrators can allow them access to other forms of education, to discipline them differently, to move them further up into the the capitalist hierarchy. And and while you know a lot of these post-liberals like, oh, we need to get rid of that. What we see is they've replaced that with nothing too. So if you look at the fates of these people who are not going to college, and yes, it's very early, it's not good. They are not like doing better. In fact, you know, blue collar jobs are declining faster now than they even were. And it is true that during during Trump's first term, he seemed to be some kind of conservative Keynesian or conservative MMTer almost, with a populist notion of like reindustrialization, which a lot of like Jacobin. magazine would love if it was being done by someone else.

Neoliberal Underinvestment And Capacity Limits

SPEAKER_02 1:00:50

Well I mean if it was being done really. I mean the economy ran a little hot in like 2018 and stuff because he lowered taxes and they had low interest rates. But it wasn't really not that much of actual reindustrialization happened under Trump one or two. No it can't well I mean here's the thing. This is like the thing this is what I'm working on I'm trying to get this book done this year about the inexorable fall of capitalism. And with in particular the particular stage that we're at as I see it is that neoliberalism as a like typified idealized within like the US and UK economies what it did is it atropied industries and like that it needed to decrease investment in order to boost capitalist consumption.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:43

Which has now led to this KK K-shaped economy where nothing's being invested in but go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:48

Yeah I mean this is exactly I mean there's one thing being invested in in the US and it's semiconductors and data centers and stuff which wasn't even something they particularly set out to do it was just a part of making this AI business case. Although semiconductor is a little bit different there's state subsidies for that but in general manufacturing investment has been on the decline as has been financing for manufacturing the Chinese don't have that problem they just increase more financing and it does like there are it it does create like a negative side of the profit distribution but in the US we still have that but we just have it for bullshit startups as opposed to actually manufacturing and in and and goods and stuff like that. So that's that's basically where we are and I don't think the US situation is sustainable at all. If you look at the the correlation between I think I might have talked about this last time between labor productivity and capital intensity the US is a big outlier and because we have such low capital intensity for our for our GDP and some people like the this uh one of the editors at the Economist have been said like know that and boast about it say look how capital efficient the US is as if we're not going to experience the same reversion to the mean that the UK did and had a decade and more of lost productivity that I think is what's in store for us. And I think this will make that'll make these politics of educated professionalism even more acute. And I like the way that it's going now like this like the like the the wokism of academia and stuff that was always just a part of all of it and I think it's going away in part because that existed because we needed a critique of capitalism as it revolutionized the instruments of production as it revolutionized society. And we're at a point of like neoliberalism that it's not revolutionizing things really and they don't need people making that critique anymore. So they're getting rid of that part. But they're still going to have educated professionals that all have groupthink and stuff they're just going to run things in a much more boring way or however whoever is in charge or the whole thing could collapse if Trump fucks around with it enough. Who knows? But I think I think the system is going to be given to I I think we can see way beyond Trump the system is given to to creating bonapartist figures who have delusions that they are somehow pre-liberal and they are maybe ultra liberal yeah yeah I mean this is like the I mean there's there is no no one is presenting a way out right now of this political problem and this is like this is a whole and like China's has the same problems too of like it has educated professionals running everything. That's what the Communist Party is they are a group of educated professionals running everything. But they just happen to be running it better because they know to invest in actual production and they don't care about capitalist consumption. So if they're not captured by bourgeois the bourgeoisie is like a class interest in the same way and but the problem is fundamental global it it is it is everywhere of professionalism and the crisis of social reproduction that's creating both in terms of atomization of birth rates of people like having any sort of meaning in their life it's all those things. And until like in the solution comes from finding an alternative way of reproducing society of having a politics with without educated professionals and also an economy without them I want to write for Cosmonaut at some point an article that just says abolish professionalism or maybe abolish universities and abolish professionalism or something like that. Which I'll get to once I work out my theory of the state stuff a bit more but it's like that needs to be said and articulated very loudly I think hmm I mean I I think the issue that you that you have is is America does need a Russification both both the professionals and the proletariat and I think this is going to make people really uncomfortable are degenerated subjects like as as groupings. Well I mean the problem is is that they're also like the people in the rural areas are also that is is the issue.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:26

Right no I mean the what peasant we don't have a peasantry I mean like like the rural areas are either petite bourgeois are even more degenerated proletarian subjects and when I say degenerated I'm not making a moral judgment here. I mean what what you find in a lot of the blue collar proletariat for a variety of reasons including structural unemployment including disability from injuries at work including poor health care including bad education and you know kotsky stuff about the socialization of labor I I one of our mutual friends of the Marxist unity group was like talking about Amazon as if it was gonna you know the Amazon whatever monopoly is if we're gonna socialize labor more and I'm like there are many reasons not to to not say much about monopolization.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:14

I mean that's something I was hoping like six years ago but it didn't happen.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:18

Right I'm like never caught on no I I I I have a theory that I I do think that that we have to deal with which is the centralization of of capital plus the organic composition of capital means that they no longer need to do that much socialization of labor to make in a in a real sense to maintain productive capacity and thus why would they and to me I know this gets into an almost idealist framework and I'm gonna admit that ahead of time but to me it means that like we have let things go so long with a failed left that in the West the a the the Chinese are are I agree with you are probably going to be the people who end neoliberalism by just being better capitalists and ones that function. And B we here have let pretty much every sector of our society and I think it's clear even now in the military and in the upper bourgeoisie and the hot bourgeoisie that they're all degenerated too. Like I can't imagine you know Warren Buffett acting like Alice Carp. I can't even imagine he's too dignified for it. Right I mean what what you see is like people who just don't have a sense of social reproductive the function of social reproduction anymore even amongst themselves.

Why Post-Liberals Can’t Build Elites

SPEAKER_02 1:08:52

Yeah like but here's the thing go ahead is is that like we need to figure out a way to address people as like basically purely atomized subjects and this is something that's like Jarvin understands but he doesn't understand that you still need people to think for themselves because he really thinks everyone just need is everyone's just a herd a mass of like sheep or whatever but like you need to be able to reach people everywhere and tell them to think about what's going on and to understand it and to be able to cooperate in some way with each other because otherwise then we're all doomed basically is that there that is there's no hope for society in the long term if that doesn't happen. And because there is no like jump tar jump starting like a any sort of movement or new way of socialization without this we have to deal with the fact that everyone is totally atomized and what was the word you were using like of degenerated subjects yeah yeah I mean they're collectively degenerated subjects I mean like for example I don't talk about the lump in anymore I talk about lumpinization because we see lump and traits across the entire spectrum of society like like so you know and then I tell people you know Marxists you should be worried about this because I'm like oh they're like oh mal worked with the lump and I'm like but not as lump and he didn't you know like like what he would try to do as opposed to trying to shut them out or fight them like sometimes the USSR did they tried to educate them into being proletariat and it took about 50% of the time like you know and I'm sorry but I don't see any of you having the capacity to do that.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:45

Like you know and what's interesting about this is in some ways I was thinking about this also when you talk about the cultural revolution I'm like you and I are rustified intellectuals in a way yeah I guess like like we would have been like if we'd have been born in in the 50s in the 70s we would have been relatively ensconced in academia if we'd have got there now I don't know that either one of us would have got there because of our backgrounds but if we'd ever gotten to undergrad that's where we would have ended up and like now it's like you know and and and you would think that you know for actually it is true that for Marxism this has been good for the popular Marxism but it hasn't led us to be able to do anything. So like Marxism is more popular now because it's a lot of us are out in society talking to people.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:37

I mean like they did elect Mamdani for what's worth I mean the whole Jacobin wave that did culminate in something I guess it's I don't think it's enough it'll I don't think it'll go anywhere on its own. It needs people to take it further but like I I I do think people don't give Jacobin enough credit for actually like one realizing that like the the poststructural moment was done after uh occupy wall street and actually trying to organize the left into something which eventually produced the DSA as we know it. But obviously like now this is something I talked about in my uh Flowers for marks review of of like how theoretically intellectually like falling behind Jacobin is compared to the a lot of the rest of the left now yeah I mean this is the thing when you were when you were a vanguard and at the end of one period but what you bring about is necessary but insufficient I mean one thing I will say about Boschkar that I mean someone like Chris Katron not one of my favorite theorists at all but what will say is like Boschkar was one of the best intellectual organizers of his generation which is true actually yeah even though today yeah even though today he sounds like a late boomer progressive he was quite innovative from 2007 to to the end of the Jacobin Reading Clubs and he was quite good at getting people who otherwise hated each other in academia to at least exist in a sphere that they could write for the public as opposed to just little academic magazines and beyond blogs which was the other place where this was really taking off but now one of the things you've had is they've been so successful but they haven't truly been able to like dislodge progressivism as an ideology they've just sort of merged with it. I mean they there is still like antagonism with like Vivik Chibber's periodic interviews which I mean he here's the thing is that he always said says dumb stuff in them but I always feel like the things that people get mad at are the wrong things and all every time he goes viral that it's always he's not he's not like woke enough or whatever but really he's just getting his whole theory is just kind of stupid in a whole bit different way people were mad at him the other day and I was like dude said that the reason why we needed market socialism is because people don't have incentives to lie in markets whereas they do in gosplan what you should be way more pissed off about that um you know I mean like yeah I think he's got a bad reading of Robert Brenner and I'm not a Brennerist and you know like but y'all you know outside of outside of people who really pay attention to proxy battles between Maoist and Trotz had through high theory in the 70s I don't think that most people even realize what the six of that were about except that colonialism bad o'kay which you know I even cheaper thinks colonialism is bad like and I'm like so see do you under you even understand why people are mad like the malast are mad because he's saying that capitalism is the is the primary antagonism not a secondary one and for most people I don't even think they understand what that means so like you know I I have deep sympathies for a lot of Maoism but I'm also like it's barely Marxism like I've I've I find this very I but yeah I find this very funny because I'm also like with you I'm like well like you guys are mad at the analytical Marxists for the wrong reasons. Um you know honestly I think it's just that people there's this whole genre now that people are calling left slop on social media which I think like now there's like so it's clearly left slop posts giving like pop explanations for things going on.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:06

But it's also I think there's a lot of there's a lot of TikTok that's left slop but go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:11

I mean but it's been a whole genre I feel like going back decades you could call left slop and that is mostly where a lot of this is coming from I mean my favorite left slop is though tick top left slop is so it's like transparently wrong yeah like like blaming the CCRU for Curtis Jarvin and thus implicating Mark Fisher in neo-feudalism.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:39

He did not read that shit he could not understand it if he read it like and I was like no Fisher read him not the other way around and Land and Fisher had broke a decade before that happened and neither one of them founded the CCRU that was founded by Sadie Williams.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:04

Like it's just like you know I that was like the blatant one and I remember commenting on it and they're like well what do you know and I'm like I'm literally a guy who published Mark Fisher I like happen to have known him kind of um so it it's a it's a funny thing to see where all this has gone but yeah I mean you know I do wonder about this with the left though I mean like for example on one hand I think a lot of people can't grasp as one of the funny things I had to fill nil on the you know post-communization guy and we were talking about Mandani it's like oh yeah I would have voted for him most of these people are cowards like but but mandani like at least offers some some kind of something that's insufficient but would be necessary and I'm like well you know I think most of us agree with that like like when I look at Mandani's plans I'm like well it's like a slightly more radical build de Blasio and you know what I'm not against that because the alternative is nothing yeah I mean it's like they might actually be managing to expropriate some apartment buildings and stuff and depending on what they do with that it could go well or very badly if they don't actually find a way to sustain them in a in a good way but that that's finally someone actually expropriating something in the United States my God I mean we're finally it's like the the baby step forward.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:41

Yeah I was about to say and honestly that's one of the few things the bomb markets can't fuck up because almost all the other plans they can as I as I have said recently I was like one of the ironies today is you guys who just scream tax the rich is you do realize that if you tax the rich at least 11% of every dollar that you got taxed would go directly back to said rich.

Parties, Factions, And The Left’s Dilemma

SPEAKER_02 1:19:12

I'm like yeah that's what the bond debt does anyway I mean the other your other options are to be you know I don't know like some malice saying that people should do nothing as ICE and most malice malice listeners I know most of you don't believe this but I have seen it should we should just let ICE do whatever it wants because it'll weaken the American empire and I'm like I I this really sounds like after after the social democrat after the Nazis us talk and you you gotta know how that has gone historically guys it feels like I don't know something the sparks would say in the 2000s or something yeah it's I mean as usual things aren't going great but you know I I feel like the as I'm looking at post liberalism I'm like these people are literally decades behind where the left is at in terms of actually understanding these things.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:27

No it feels like they're speed running the middle 20 which is funny actually Nico because the right's actually already learned this and forgotten it. Like the Birchers were democratic centralists like in fact they were the dumb not actually existing Stereotype of democratic centralists.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:50

And I mean, and that's exactly what they're gonna try to do a second time is the stereotype of it because they don't understand it. They it's always through some like cartoon uh caricature of what it was, and it didn't work anyway in the in the west. And so they're like literally they don't know the left's history, they don't know their own history, and they're going, they're literally running in circles right now because they don't know any of that, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:21:18

I mean, well, the other part of yeah, the the part of democratic centralism in the malice context that they can't replicate is and neither could the Maoist sex in the West. You have to have a mass in your party to have a mass line. Yeah, you can't have a mass line.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:38

I mean, but this is important though, but that like that I think that the left has is finally starting to learn the lessons from some of these things. That like the these problems of a collapse of socialization happened first with the left in like the in the communist countries and also in the communist parties in the West that had their own civil society associated with them, that they destroyed the civil society in both of those situations from the top down. Um, and this is the big problem with democratic centralism as it's been classically understood, and why I think it's so important to embrace a pro-factionalist party so that you can have an open civil society associated with your party, yeah. Otherwise, you'll just kill it again.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:26

I mean, you know, this is this is one of these things is I am I am a small d small c democratic centralist, and that I think we should like that we should go with the will of the majority and who they vote for, and we should have a relatively centralized party. But I'm also in some ways different from that, and and more like you know, the early first and early second internationals where I'm like, we gotta have ties to organizations outside of the party, are the party goes nowhere. And that you know, this is this is a critique I have of a lot of smaller DSA branches, this is not their fault, but they can really only do electoralism are these other forms of base building because of their membership limitations and their money limitations, but it does put them in a cul-de-sac, and I have been like, well, you know, you should look at New York, but you should also go, you should ask yourself, why can't your chapter do what the New York chapters do? And I'm just gonna tell you, you don't, even though what uh I don't know how many people, how many DSAs in your I'd say, like let's be generous and say 10,000. Because I I do believe it's uh I do believe it's like like a temp for the organization or something that they do have a relatively active mass base and internal party culture, even though they're not a party, and even though they can't be a party because of the legal structure of the of the DSA, blah blah blah blah blah. I I know all that very well, but they do understand that it has its problems, and you know, there are factions that I don't like, but if you're just like well, go join X Sect, and I'm like, which one? Okay, the CPUSA has between five and twenty thousand people, depending on who I trust or their numbers, since there aren't formal ones easily available. Uh, but I don't see them doing I don't see them doing I don't see the CPUSA hardly anywhere. Like, I know they exist, I know there's card carrying members, I know card carry members here. Do I see them at rallies or doing anything? No, not as a CPUSA, anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:32

I see them, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:35

But again, no one knows how big they are, and I know they're less than 20,000, and they're not really replicable either. Like, so you know, I guess there's the old sex, or there's like the the the like what 20 Trotskyist and I don't know what the RCI or the Revolutionary Communist Organization used to be the IMT, the the the Grantite Woodite trots, they're still around, and there's like I don't I'm sure there's some old um like the Ivakians are still around, but where is everybody else?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:18

You know, like mostly in the DSA, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:25:23

Yeah, I mean they've liquidated into DSA, and at this point, you know, I mean like I've said like there's a spectrum in the DSA, sometimes even within the same caucus, yeah, like from like I mean, I don't know how many dungists are in the communist caucus, but there are like communizers and dungists in the same caucus, much less the same organization. Like, and as much as you know, we can talk about how shitty the DSA is, and it kind of is, it's also there is nothing else out of labor unions that we really have that has any reach and scale.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:04

Well, I mean, even in terms of like labor unions, even in terms of any other organization in the country, I don't think you can say that it has like it is democratic, democratic to the same extent in that it has allows like these different factions within it. No, certainly no group on the right is like that. Like TPUSA was all just like a top-down like mobilization.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:28

It's top down and then vibes. It's like uh it's like vibes and the bot and the bottom 60%, and then it's really rigid beyond that. Uh-huh. That's how most of those organizations worked, even when I was like on the right in my early 20s.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:41

It's like there's a there's how most organizations work, period. Yeah in the country.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:47

Vibes, vibes, vibes, then some like closed door leadership that you might have some say in, you probably don't, unless you're on the board.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:57

Good luck getting collections are, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:02

And they do degenerate and cannibalize themselves. Uh, you want to talk about uh you know, you want to talk about institution that even right wingers are talking about the king at the very time it seems to have won the heritage foundation. Oh, yeah, it's hemorrhaging internal people.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:19

I mean, because there's nothing left, there's no like the whole purpose of it was to produce ideology, but you can't anymore. There's no point, it's just whatever Trump says, right.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:29

I mean, so you have people, you know, liberals who go, they're they got Project 2025. I'm like, yeah, but they also didn't. I mean, like, the people who want to ban porn and are pushing for porn bans at the state level are also bringing in more OnlyFans models than any other thing in visas. I mean, like, I don't know, you know, this like even as a synthetic ideology, it's like I mean, like, it's transparently bullshit. And and the thing is, is who's gonna be attracted to that?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:04

Nobody really, nobody of any conviction, right? Which is what I was talking about with like uh Louis Philippism. I mean, I mean, Trump is a bonaparte figure, but these people were built for like trying to justify someone, right? And that they're that's not necessary anymore. It's I I mean, if it I don't know, it's it's all it's all pointless now. The whole apparatus they created.

DSA, Unions, And Organizational Scale

C. Derick Varn 1:28:31

Well, Nico, I when this comes out, send it to me if it comes out before if your article comes out before I release this. This will be released at the end of February. Where can people find your work?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:42

So they can read my writings at Prehistory of an Encounter on Substack. I have a Twitter and a blue sky, and usually have stuff in Cosmonaut, and hopefully this will come out of Palladium. We'll see if they publish it. I don't know. If they if they don't, I'll see if I can get it published somewhere else. Because I want, in particular, some post-liberal people to read it, is the point.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:07

Yeah, they wouldn't read it in Cosmonaut. No, they wouldn't. But yeah, it's it's good to have you on. And it's good to talk about where we are because it because the one thing I will say is the left has not been able to dethrone the democratic center, and we get we get captured by it all the time. But our opposition is in shambles by winning.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:44

You know, I just like when winning is one of the worst things that can happen to your ideology, perhaps it wasn't working. But anyway, thank you for coming on, and you'll be back again. We got I I have like four other topics we've talked about covering, so I'll probably talk to you in about a month and a half.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:07

Sounds good.