Trade Wars As Social Wars with Benjamin Studebaker

Welcome back to the vlog. Today, we are staging an exhaustive, macro-analytical conversation with political theorist and author Benjamin Studebaker to unpack his recent landmark intervention in Isonomia Quarterly: "Trade Wars or Social Wars?"

While modern political commentators treat the rising economic friction between the United States and its Western allies as a series of isolated commercial disputes, Studebaker argues that these tensions are deeply structural. Ever since successive U.S. administrations (from Obama to Trump and Biden) deliberately disabled the World Trade Organization by blocking appointments to its appellate body, the rules-based international order has fragmented into raw bilateral coercion.

Under the second Trump administration, this geopolitical strangulation has accelerated. Allies are being forced to subsidize the U.S. military-industrial base and domestic shale oil industry by purchasing overpriced American weapons and liquefied natural gas (LNG). Paradoxically, European leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are selling this massive defense buildup to their domestic publics as a triumph of "European autonomy" from a volatile United States. In reality, Studebaker exposes this "Euro-Gaullism" as a complete illusion: it actively Americanizes the European continent by forcing states to gut their social welfare programs to accommodate defense spending, keeping them trapped inside the NATO command structure.

We recontextualize this crisis using an ancient historical framework: The Roman Social War. Unlike a civil war (fought among citizens) or a war of national independence, a social war is fought between a dominant empire and its own allies to reconfigure the legal and standing terms of their integration.

We apply this structural lens to the major flashpoints of 2026:
The Global Imbalance of Capital: Utilizing the insights of Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein (Trade Wars Are Class Wars), we track how global systemic friction is driven by states hyper-optimized for production (like China suppressing domestic wages) relying on consumers of last resort (the highly financialized, debt-leveraged United States).

The Autarky Illusion: Why modern progressive demands for deep-green decoupling or monetary "money printing" (MMT) operate as dangerous, inward-looking hallucinations that ignore the thermodynamic realities of global supply chains and international court constraints.

The Death of Left Populism: A critical post-mortem on why municipal socialist experiments—from Zohran Mamdani in New York City to Brandon Johnson in Chicago—fundamentally flatline when confronting the hard borders of the municipal bond and real estate markets.
Benjamin Studebaker's books, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy and Legitimacy and Liberal Democracies, are out now in affordable paperback from Edinburgh University Press. 
Challenge the localized delusions, map the world system, and protect your peace.

Link:
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2026/06/03/trade-wars-are-social-wars/

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

Transcript

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Welcome And The Core Claim

C. Derick Varn 0:49

Hello, welcome to Varnblog. And today, Benjamin Studebeka has returned. And we are talking about a couple things. We're going to start out with his article recently in Isonomia Quarterly. But just a reminder of his prior works. He wrote the Chronic Crisis of American Democracy, The Way is Shut, in 2023, and then Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies in 2024, which is now, I think, finally out in an affordable paperback version. And this is tangentially related to those topics, but only tangentially. So in your in your piece for Isonomia Quarterly, you explore how economic friction is being recontextualized and partially weaponized in modern geopolitics. And that the trade disputes between the United States and the global allies are not really just economic disagreements, or to put it in another way, all economic disagreements are downstream of geopolitics because geopolitics is downstream of microeconomics. Do you agree with that contention, by the way? That that this is, you know, the

WTO Breakdown And Dispute Politics

C. Derick Varn 2:31

that the that a lot of these geopolitical tensions are economic, but the way that they're being sold to the general public is completely misleading, and the framing is just frankly wrong.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Yeah, there's discontent with the way the global trade system works. You know, there's at the level of the World Trade Organization in particular, which the United States has gradually disabled by blocking appointments to the WTO appellate body. It has made the WTO unable to hear trade disputes and therefore unable to enforce its own rules. And that's a policy which sort of started with Obama and refusing to reappoint a couple of specific people on the grounds that he felt that they had ruled unfavorably against U.S. interests. And then Donald Trump in the first term refused to appoint anybody to the WTO appellate body. And then Biden continued that policy. And so now when there's a trade dispute, there has to be some other way of trying to adjudicate it. And the United States has tended to prefer bilateral discussions. Whereas the European Union and many of the Allied states have tried to construct a replacement arbitrating body, the multi-party interim arbitration arrangement. But many states have refused to join that body. And so that body is not really able to function in the way that the WTO appellate body would.

C. Derick Varn 4:00

So one of the things that you pointed out that this means the US allies have actually been in a kind of bizarre holding pattern where they don't have a lot of actual sovereignty for geopolitical movement. They might have some sovereignty for domestic movement and their domestic production, but they can't really do a lot geopolitically. And because energy politics is downstream of geopolitics, it also constrains their domestic politics in a very real way. And you've really pointed out this is intensified under the second Trump administration, where the U.S. is aggressively demanding allies make contributions to the global public goods by purchasing American weapons and liquefied natural gas. There's been a lot of pushback on that. But that has meant that actually NATO member states in Europe to, you know, that are not the US have agreed to drastically scale up their military spending, which was originally the goal in the first place. If you go back to Trump, the first Trump administration, that was stated explicitly. So you seem to think that this is actually playing into US hands, that this is actually part of what the US wants.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yeah, part of the strategy with the Europeans is to have them legitimate what the United States wants by framing it as anti-American policy. What the United States wants is framed as something which will increase European autonomy. So back in the first Trump administration, a lot of EU member states were only spending about 1% of GDP on defense, even though the NATO requirement was 2%. And over the course of the first Trump and then Biden administrations, European states were compelled to meet the 2% target with continuous pressure from the United States on the issue of Ukraine. If the Europeans want the United States to stay engaged with Ukraine, then the Europeans have got to make their contribution and meet the NATO defense spending target. As these states were all getting up to around 2%, and Germany still hadn't quite made it there, it was at, I think, 1.9% in 2024. The United States said, okay, now we need to raise the NATO defense spending requirement to 3.5%, en route to an eventual target of 5% of GDP. So just as soon as the Europeans meet the old 2% target, the gulp posts move on them. And Spain is the only state in NATO that has not signed on to these new targets. All the rest have done so. And they're now framing this defense spending as a way of increasing policy autonomy from the United States. But none of them are quitting NATO. So they're all doing it within the framework of the NATO command structure. And they're legitimating it on the grounds that the United States poses a threat to them. So there's this deep irony in the policy because it's exactly what successive U.S. presidents of both parties have been wanting them to do. And indeed, it goes above and beyond what the Americans have been asking for for years.

C. Derick Varn 7:08

Hmm. I think this is actually interesting because one of the things that it becomes immediately obvious to me is that while this is often framed as a deviation under Trump from traditional American policy, this has been a consistent American demand intention at least since the end of the well, the nominal end of the global war on terror. So since the second Obama administration. And I find this fascinating. I guess one thing to ask, I mean, you're not European, I'm not either, but do you think the Europeans know that they're that they are doing this? Is this is this like a domestic selling point where they know they're complying to U.S. residues, but are have figured out a way

NATO Spending Targets And Moving Goalposts

C. Derick Varn 7:55

to frame it as anti-United States, or is it really an ideological brine spot?

SPEAKER_00 8:03

The European leadership knows. The European leadership has a you know, many uh prime ministers and so on have explicitly said that they're making these commitments and that they have to find a way to get the public on board with these commitments, even though the public doesn't understand the depth of entanglement with the United States. The you know, the British in particular, I can't remember who it was, but somebody in the last couple of weeks who's quite important said that the public doesn't understand the degree to which the entire British system is embedded within the American system at this point, in ways that cannot be undone, such that no matter what Trump does, it can't really be in the UK strategic interest to disentangle at the level of the military and the security apparatus. And that, I think, has been the agenda for the Europeans for quite a while, has been to keep the United States engaged in Europe, in part for the purposes of deterring the Russians, in part for the purposes of preventing the Europeans from potentially having to cover their own defense spending and manage their own internal security affairs. It's difficult in European politics to legitimate, say, the creation of a European army. That's something that many European leaders have been interested in, but they haven't been able to do politically. And if they're ever going to be able to do that, it will be by pretending that a European army is a counterpower to the United States.

C. Derick Varn 9:36

But, you know, in your article, you basically say this is an illusion of a possible Euro-Gaulism, you know, a return to you know this Macrone era. I mean, Macron, like Macron trying to bring up the specter of the Gaul, and it's both farcical, but also it's not just farcical in the sense that they don't intend to do it, it's that it has at least three substantive benefits to the United States. Uh, one of which is despite calls for more military integration with you know and and arms trade with China, that that's been relatively limited, and NATO's not really seriously pursuing it. But other things have been that it would increase it would improve the the balance of trade between Europe and the United States, at least on paper, which would give the GOP, if not a real, at least a nominal economic win, that it would uh subsidize the growth of the U.S. military industrial base without requiring more domestic tax hikes, which is what the tariffs have been a backdoor way to do here, and that it would actually relieve pressure on the U.S. federal budget the way the Marshall Plan did, facilitating those tax cuts that Trump likes so much, and leaving Europe at a massive tax disadvantage for economic growth. So, I why do you think this is this is persuasive to so many people? Because to me, it's like transparently a bad deal.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Yeah, I think the Europeans feel that they're not going to be able to move forward with the Americanizing neoliberal reforms that they were looking to do after 2008 without creating a different kind of physical situation. And so if you make your budget more like an American budget, then that will entail certain logics with regard to reform of the public services, cutting of welfare benefits. So increasing defense spending puts physical pressure on all other programs that makes it easier to make European society and European budgets look more American. But for precisely that reason, historically, the European left has opposed increases in military spending. And in the piece, I give a few different examples of prominent European leaders who've been quoted saying if you increase military spending, it's going to lead to an erosion of the social state. And then this is going to lead to the spread of right-wing movements in Europe. It's been said continuously across many different national contexts for more than 50 years, right? But if you can convince people to raise defense spending on the grounds that this is necessary to keep out the Russians and that it's necessary to give you insurance against a volatile and untrustworthy United States, then all of this can be achieved and it can facilitate the Americanizing of the European continent, actually, in the name of resisting precisely that process. And it caused Andy Burnham, who is considering a leadership challenge against Armour, to start hemming and hawing about what had been reported to be his initial plan to make Ed Miliband, who is very committed to net zero, Chancellor of the Exchequer. He's now suggesting he might keep Rachel Reeves in post. So there's a little bit of fright with regard to the net zero commitment here. And I think this has a lot to do with the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran. Both of these things raised energy costs considerably, increased the reliance of the European Union and the UK on North America for liquefied natural gas. You'd totally change the energy supply chains in that regard.

Net Zero Versus AI Energy Demands

SPEAKER_00 16:31

And all of that, of course, comes back to Obama and his commitment to promoting shale oil drilling. You know, under Obama, shale oil drilling took off massively, even as he acted like he was interested in keeping it in the ground or not building pipelines. All that meant in practice was that you'd stick the shale oil on bomb trains instead of delivering it through pipelines. It wasn't any kind of substantive commitment to not developing the shale oil resources. But anyway, all of this is to say that as those energy prices have kicked up, there is a perception that the net zero commitment is not something that can be met in a short enough unit of time to be compatible with keeping energy prices at a level that allows the AI sector to competitively develop in the UK and in Europe. So now there is a lot of questions about whether they're going to stick with that. So it's got you know Blair, who's opposed to net zero, and you know, Miliband, who's for it, and Burnham being contested by these two figures. And then in the conservative party, you know, people like Theresa May and Michael Gove are for net zero. And then right now it's not sensible for the front bench politicians to be for it politically. So you know, people like Kemi Badenak are not. So it's a weird situation where both the Conservative Party and the Labor Party are having almost the same kind of debate internally about whether the net zero commitment facilitates something like a Green New Deal and therefore jobs and economic growth, or whether it's placing a headwind on AI and the tech sector.

C. Derick Varn 18:20

Hmm. I mean, I guess we're gonna have to see how the the AI market fares in the United States since it's taken uh an interesting detour in the last week, but who knows? I mean, I don't I don't know. I have thought a lot about this in terms of Europe because you know, data centers need both land and power, and Europe notoriously has neither. So um they're high, it's high density land, and their their energy situation has been precarious for a while, although I guess France is in better steed there because of their nuclear development. I I guess this gets us to like you know the constraints here, because what it really proves is geopolitically and thus even to some degree domestically, that US's Western European allies are high are very, very constrained. And like talks about leveraging China against the US or going and doing more trade deals with BRICS or or even some Grand Atlanticist deal with Canada and letting the US rot, which a lot of American progressive thinks is happening, doesn't actually seem to be in the cards at all.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Yeah, part of the trouble is that the the European Union brought back the fiscal rules, which had been suspended during the COVID pandemic, and the only exemption is defense spending. So if a state like Spain refuses to commit to the defense spending, it will just be bound now by the fiscal rules without the defense spending carve out that allows some states to smuggle various forms of investment through the fiscal rules. And outside of Spain, all of the other states have committed to the defense spending and are trying to find a way to make their state investments compatible with that.

C. Derick Varn 20:17

Now, one of the things I think this is this is very interesting that I wanted to float by you. American military tech is notoriously overpriced, even for us in the United States. Like it's one of our strategic disadvantages for dealing with a run. Like it costs, like it costs us something like a hundred times what it costs them to make a missile. Our missiles are way better, but that doesn't matter when it takes a few million dollars to make one and about a year, and there's no real way to increase productivity even with massive amounts of automation. I am a little bit out of a loss to to wonder how we're going to provide all this. I mean, and yet it's also clear to me that there is no real alternative that the that the Europeans and the British find acceptable, and like turning to the Russians, that they're definitely not going to do that, trying to peel China off from Russia and their strategic alliance while the energy situation makes that with the Strait of Hermuz, makes that less likely. And it keeps on bringing down governments right and left in in the EU. I mean, like, you know, what I'm beginning to wonder, will we ever have a very long-sitting German government? Will will a French president have a parliament that's in his own party again? I like I have no idea.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah. But this is a part why I wrote this piece because I sympathize with the allied situation. I'm not somebody who thinks that it's a great or wonderful thing to tear apart European social programs. I think that the healthcare system is important. I think that the railroads and the public transit, and I have a huge respecter of the European university systems. I went to European universities. So, you know, I have a lot of respect for a lot of the things that have been built out there, and a lot of Americans do. A lot of Americans get very into European and Japanese culture and visit and have connections to these places and admire all sorts of things about these ways of life. And of course, these ways of life were built with the health. Of the United States, which facilitated and created fiscal space in the post-war era for the construction of all of this stuff. So part of my aim in this piece is to think about how the Allies could turn this situation around. And the first thing that they would have to do is to get a sufficient level of energy autonomy, not for the purposes of breaking away from the United States and doing their own thing, but so that they can actually engage in trade wars, not real wars, but trade wars, on a sufficiently strong footing that they might actually be able to extract and not just trade concessions, I think, but the goal has to be political concessions. Because the history of the last 10 years is that because the Allies don't have any kind of voice in DC politically, the United States takes foreign policy decisions that cause enormous disruption to European supply

Energy Autonomy As Real Leverage

SPEAKER_00 23:43

chains. And then this just puts the Europeans in a supine position where they have to buy LNG and they become more energy dependent. And now Japan as well. Japan recently made a deal to invest in Alaskan liquefied natural gas in exchange for gas shipments. And it looks like a nice deal for the Japanese because since they'll have a stake in the company, they will be able to profit from purchasing their own gas effectively. But this creates a relationship of dependence that makes it harder for the Japanese to challenge the United States and demand things from the United States, because Japan will be dependent on the United States for energy. So I think there needs to be a cultivation of energy autonomy, but not for the purposes of trying to break away because the Allied states aren't in position to be able to successfully do that, but for the purposes of getting representation in DC, specifically so that they can influence and affect what US presidents choose to do in foreign policy, so that you don't get into a situation where the manner in which the United States is choosing to handle Russia or handle Iran is imposing enormous energy costs, which drag, you know, which make the production of everything in Europe more expensive, which cause all sorts of European industries to lose ground and to look uncompetitive and non-viable.

C. Derick Varn 25:09

I mean, we definitely seen this with like Germany going from like the workshop of the Western world to WTF man. I mean, basically. I know that sounds insulting.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

And what MERS has been saying recently where he was scolding the population for not working hard enough. The problem is not that the Germans aren't working hard enough, it's that instead of buying all of this cheap Russian gas like they used to do, they now have to import this very expensive LNG.

C. Derick Varn 25:38

Well, I I think it's interesting because one of the things that your paper really wants us to do, and you you you began to lay this out in your last little bit here, is to reconceptualize what trade wars were actually for. I mean, because historically, 19th, early 20th, 18th century, even trade wars were either mercantile or they were about national decoupling and autarky. And the reason why we kind of turned against trade wars is it was true that when you do trade wars for this reason, you usually just have a war, like just it just becomes a straight-up shooting war eventually. But you're kind of arguing that effectively what the Americans are doing is uh indirectly taxing the Europeans, um, and that the trade war kind of should be used, not for this, you know, kind of autarchic narrative, because we all kind of know that's not possible, particularly for the for for just resource and land constraints reasons, particularly for the Europeans. I mean so that what you actually suggest they should do is use trade force to get concessions to integrate into like a more common tax market and more common regulatory structure since the rules-based international order in quotation marks, which has always been kind of imperial anyway, but has no longer been seen as in the interest of the people who set it up, and so the Europeans insisting on that leverage. I mean, I I watch so many things, even from politically knowledgeable people in Europe, who find the Europeans' reliance on this to be an other joke. And this leads me to the second thing that you contend, and this I really want you to talk about, because I haven't, you know, I've studied ancient history and I tried to explain to people the concept of social wars versus versus civil wars and what those distinctions are and how we flatten them out in the 20th century and blah blah blah blah blah. But you actually think we should view this as like a social cold war, basically. Yeah, why is that? And and what are we learning from this like this Roman social war model? Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

So a civil war is a war among citizens of a Paladine. A social war is a war between a state and that state's allies, and it's a struggle for the purposes of changing the way in which that state relates to the allies. So rather than a war of independence, and in the you know, the last hundred years, the focus has been on thinking in terms of imperialism and therefore on independence and national self-determination. I'm proposing that we move past that and instead think in terms of a struggle which is about changing the relationship among the units. So it's a struggle which is not about breaking apart the social relations and eliminating

Trade Wars As Social Wars

SPEAKER_00 28:34

them, it's about reconfiguring those relations and changing how they work. And I think in particular, you can use a social war to struggle for civil rights. So you can use a social war to get civil standing. And I think that ultimately what the Europeans should be aiming for is you know, some stuff that might seem crazy for me to just say it today in 2026. But I think they should be trying to get electoral votes. They should be trying to get senators, they should be trying to get members of Congress, even. And they should be trying to get this without having to give their policy autonomy, or uh they should be demanding that also, as part of this, that many of the social programs that they have be taken up by the United States so that they aren't operating at a competitive disadvantage. Instead of the Europeans developing a budget that looks more like the American budget, the Europeans should be trying to make the American budget look more like a European budget.

C. Derick Varn 29:39

And how do you think the Americans should handle? I mean, this is one of the things that that I have often been been pushing out now, because what we see now is tech sector development and its ties to the military-industrial complex here, you know, on our soil, leading to what would amount to if they actually pulled it off a social reproduction crisis that could like not just divide the country. Like, I do think like if pushed to the extreme could lead to a possible civil war. Now, I think that's usually now used way too early and way too hyperbolically, but I'm not saying it's likely, but the fact that it's non-zero actually concerns me. Why should Americans who care about this want this too? Like, like, you know, like I mean, why should we give a shit about Europe at all?

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Like I think if we look at our own society, we've reached a point where, you know, what's the horizon for this project? What are the new ideas for what the United States can be? They revolve around concentration of an enormous amount of wealth in the hands of a small number of tech companies. These companies using this wealth to develop an ever more elaborate military and intelligence gathering apparatus. This thing being the thing that you export to other states around the world so that they can copy elements of this. And, you know, you what do the Europeans buy from American defense companies? They buy, you know, like Andoril border defense towers. You know, they buy stuff so that they can securitize their population and they can copy various elements of American policy. This is not a very inspiring horizon for the future. And as long as states are stuck in this competitive game where it's about trying to win at the level of attracting tech companies to your territory, and about trying to win at the level of having fielding a military that's competitive with China's. If we're thinking in terms of geostrategic competition, it's really going to limit what we can ultimately do and become over the course of the century. All of the interesting ideas for what we could do with our technology to make life more livable and more pleasant have all come from the Allied states. All of the inspiring visions people have had since World War II of life have come out of Japan and Germany and France and the UK and the Scandinavian countries. We should find a way to get these kinds of ideas in dialogue with what we're doing in the United States, but it requires that we qualify the competition that's currently dominating and dictating how people think about what to do. And the way to do that, I think, is to create something larger that has more weight in the market, find ways to combine the market power of the Europeans with the Americans without ruining the European social model and destroying the things about Europe that are interesting in the process of doing that, which is currently, I think, the trajectory.

C. Derick Varn 32:51

I mean, it does seem ironic that that to save the European lay of life, what they're doing is doing a military buildup, which of course is not as massive as the United States because no one in their right mind would do that. But except for us, it does seem incredibly parasitic. And what I was thinking about about these tech companies is they're not just parasitic on the worker on rents or whatever you want to say, they're also parasitic on other productive parts of society. And quite literally, actually. I don't just mean like, oh, they're stopping investment. And no, they're dependent on the prior investment in that, but also limit our ability to do that, even in the private market, not just in the public one. And they're very volatile, as we are talking about right now, and their capex expenditures versus their revenues are insane. Like, you know, and this has been talked about a lot, but it really does seem that it's there. And one of the reasons why I think a lot of these tech companies have gotten so interested in getting tied into the military is like, well, that's usually the one spending apparatus where you can be totally irrational. Um and so it's kind of a a backdoor bailout in a lot of ways. Although it's that even that has seemed to have limits, as Palantir has run into lately. But I I do think that you're right that there that there's a kind of bleak diagnosis on the horizon here. The most Americans seem to be able to imagine is Euro socialism on a city level, which isn't really possible, weird paranoid techno uh ethno-religious nationalism, and even undoing things like the 13th and 14th Amendment, delusions about an AI god at the expense of hyperscale centers that use double the power of my state where they're going to build it, although apparently that's running in the problems now. And then paralyzing self-hatred and self-flagellation, where like no one can imagine what like if an American left did come to power at a national level, there is no realistic idea about like changing what the imperial apparatus is. It's either like we just don't engage with the rest of the world at all, so you have left Turker Carlsonism or whatever, which is not even fair to Tuckle Carlson, to be honest, or basically in a continuation of the status quo. And while you don't mention this, like the you are seeing more of this with Israel, you know, more and more technological integration and stuff with Israel and not with Europe. I I kind of I kind of think you know one of the things I was fascinated with about this is I was like, this does give us as um in the United States a way to start thinking about what we could do by aiding with this that isn't also just self-hatred or or political negationism or whatever. Because the other thing I think we can see, and uh we I don't know if you and I agree on the reasons why, but like even both right and left in the United States pretty much hates itself. And I'm sure there's uh I would say there's political economic reasons, you'd say there's structural reasons for that. We might even agree on some of them, but but that maybe that by incorporate by by using trade as a leverage to not just change European foreign policy but also American domestic policy, maybe that could give some people some hope of a more realistic grounding. Because, you know, the other thing is like the United States and China are in a Thucydides trap. So it's the like the historical analogs are at the moment really quite bad. How do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_00 37:05

Yeah, the United States needs more of a direct stake in peace, prosperity, and order in Eurasia. Right now, there are too many cases where the United States can go, we have liquefied natural gas in two moats. We don't have to care about what happens in Eurasia, or we can withstand a crisis in Eurasia for longer than the states based in Eurasia can withstand it. This creates, I think, a negative incentive. The United States has an incentive to disrupt and cause trouble in Eurasia because it thinks it can inflict more punishment on rivals than it will have to endure itself. If the United States had integrated politically to a much greater degree with some of the territories in Eurasia, those territories would give the United States a direct stake

How Integration Could Reshape America

SPEAKER_00 37:51

in maintaining peaceful and prosperous conditions for human beings in Eurasia. And it would become a lot harder for the United States to have all these wack-a-doodle, you know, adventurist foreign policies that involve a lot of risk for people in Eurasia, but not much for Americans. So Americans don't think seriously, you know, don't take seriously what all of that will involve. And to give another example, in addition to Russia and Iran, you know, the adventurism in Iraq kicked off horrible refugee crises that devastated European countries and produced racial tension, produced religious tension, helped the right to reframe the post-2008 crisis in a way which was advantageous for it. And all of this is connected to an American foreign policy which thought, ah, we can take an experiment in the Middle East and try something. And it won't ultimately cost very much, even if it fails, to the United States. And if there are costs, they'll be paid by other states in the region that are competitor states. You know, this way of thinking, where the United States just doesn't take seriously risks that involve Eurasian lives, uh, you know, I think this is something that could end, but it would require that the United States actually have skin in the game in Eurasia. The United States needs territory and people and GDP in Eurasia. So how do you think that would happen? So I think the Europeans would have to recognize that they're in a situation where either they're gonna be Americanized against their wills in ways which utterly deform their form of life, or they're gonna participate in the Americanization process in a way that allows them to change what it means to be American, to actually, I think, revitalize potentially, if they were to play it right, the whole concept of being American. And one of the things that's happened recently is that American leaders have been making ethno-nationalist arguments that sound like you know early 20th century European identities. And meanwhile, the European leadership have been trying to transcend all of that and get past all of that, and they've been talking about being European like it's something anybody can be. So they've been thinking about being European like it's being American, while the Americans have been thinking about being American like it's being a nationality from a particular European country. So, in some ways, what the Europeans are doing at this point is more American than what the Americans are doing. And so there is, I think, a possibility of interfusing these things together in a way that saves the American project from itself, and which would also therefore save the European project from being consumed by a bad kind of Americanism, which is the negation of the European. And I'm seeing a lot of people lately talk about European and American, you know, as if these are two different civilizations. And I think this is just really unhelpful, you know, it because it none of it's true in the in the slightest. The Europeans and the Americans have had so much to do with each other for so long. The legal systems, the political philosophy, there's been so much interchange culturally between the two for so long that treating them as if they're completely different civilizations is just not helpful. There's been a divergence in form of life, very much to do with the way in which the Europeans and the Americans have managed the whole post-World War II system and the way they've constructed it together. And they still have the capacity to construct something together if they think about themselves as doing that and take seriously that they they can be part of constructing this if they think strategically about it. And for so long, the Europeans have been thinking about this too much in national terms. National European leaders try to influence the United States on the basis of personal relationships, Blair with Bush, you know, Sarkozy and Obama. You know, there are these efforts by you know specific European leaders to use personal charisma or something to influence US foreign policy. And it's been very ineffective. The Europeans need a much more concrete connection to the United States to be able to influence its development and trajectory.

C. Derick Varn 42:17

Now I think this leads me to a couple of questions. Uh, you and I both know what the left response to this were gonna is going to be. That we are suggesting renewed imperialism. And I, you know, I consider myself a brilliant anti-imperialist, and yet I don't know how the return to 19th century nationalism uh goes when you just kind of ignore how that led to the creation of the current system in the first place. And we now have nuclear weapons, killer drones, and chemical weapons that we couldn't imagine in the 19th century. So such conflicts that led to the creation of this system would potentially be human extinction level. No, I'm not trying to scare monger, I don't necessarily know that it would be, but I don't know that it won't be either. And I think that's fascinating when people, you know, will talk about. I mean, a lot of a lot of left politics around like a lot of this is just to me, just I have long noted this tendency of people to have milk toast politics domestically, but then be maximalist on foreign policy because frankly, they have no effect on it anyway, and it doesn't really matter what they say. So, maximalist moral posturing can get a whole lot of traction because there's literally no skin in the game and no accountability for it, and that goes in both anti-imperial and imperial directions. Like you also have right wingers saying and saying shit, because again, there's no skin in the game, and there's no accountability, and they're not gonna have any effect on the even our military industrial politics, much less our relationship to Eurasia at all. But it does seem to me that we get caught up in minor narratives and minor spats. I'll the example you give in your paper is the Greenland event, which you know, I saw how even liberals responded to that. Like, oh, we're gonna end NATO, there's it we're potentially tensing towards world war. And you know, my immediate thought about that was okay, I'll entertain that for a minute, but part of me thinks that there's no way the American Central Command would even let that happen. Like, not in a million years. So when I thought about that, I'm like, okay, this has to be for some other reason. You talk about the idea of Kfabe that a lot of this is like illusionary fights that allow people to save face or pivot. Basically, to legitimate other stuff.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

If you have a Kfabe fight and you go, look, if we attacked Greenland, you wouldn't be able to defend it because you haven't invested in the defense of the Arctic. This is a spectacular way of saying, please invest in the defense of the Arctic as part of your NATO contribution. That's how I took it. It was a demand, a very pointed demand for NATO contributions in the form of Arctic spending. There were NATO summits, you know, prior to that discussion, which were focused around Arctic defense spending as a collective endeavor. European countries made commitments to Arctic defense spending, but they were sluggish about allocating the funds. And speaking as if, you know, if you won't make these moves and defend the Arctic, then the United States will have to defend the Arctic for you. And it doesn't want to do that for free. So you'd have to compensate the United States, perhaps in the form of mineral rights in Greenland. You know, this was a way of negotiating who was going to pay the cost of Arctic defense, particularly with regard to Greenland. And it was done in a ridiculous way, which had a stupefying effect on the public and caused a lot of Europeans to become all of a sudden very willing to support Arctic defense spending, which was precisely what the Americans had been asking for explicitly, you know, in the year leading up to the whole thing.

C. Derick Varn 46:28

I think this is particularly obvious with Canada. There's a harder problem when you deal with Mexico, but like us, for example, the current Canadian government has taken strong rhetorical stances against the United States and even like pointed out some quote-unquote imperial truce that I might even agree with. But then when you actually see what they do, they still capitulate to United States dominance because their economy is totally dependent on it. And and the ability to pivot again to China or Europe as a consumer of last resort or to integrate your infrastructure. Well, that's really hard for Canada because oceans. But it seems to be a smokescreen for renegotiating integration from a prior regime, but the same thing is going to happen, the integration is going to happen. And the relationship is quite different in Latin America, you know. But it seems to be that Canada, for example, is even a more acute case of what you're talking about happening with Europe. And while it has really, really you know accelerated Canadian nationalism, Canadian national identity, because and I might anger, I have a profound Canadian listeners listenership. It might anger them when I say that most of their national identity is just they're not us. Um like, which is in some ways, uh, like you said, with this whole like idea that we are separate civilizations or even like really different national cultures, the Ontario accent is the same as New York's. The I mean, with a slight difference on vowel pronunciation, but it's almost like it's very hard to identical. When I lived in Korea, nobody, Europeans or or Asians, could tell Americans and Canadians apart unless they asked us about our healthcare system. And I find that fascinating because, like, you know, for a country whose identity, and I say this as a person who at one time had dual citizenship, uh, is not the United States. Well, when the rest of the world approaches us, they're like, Well, they try I treat you, yeah, I talk to you guys the same way because you basically share culture. I find this interesting though. What you know, why do you think people have been doubling down on the specter of of early 20th century, late 19th century nationalism geopolitically and economically when when it also seems like why on the earth would you do that? You could more be easy, like the more you you balkanize like that, the more easily you are raided by multinational corporations.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Yeah, I think it's because it's the thing that's readily available to hand is people become discontented with the post-World War II order, because the post-World War II order failed to reform itself after 2008 in a way that would address the various grievances with it, and then began to break down insofar as the United States stopped cooperating with the WTO and began to force it to become dysfunctional. People have looked to historical examples, which is the usual thing people do. They start looking for what's the most recent time in which the things that are in the way didn't apply. So, what's the most recent time in which the post-World War II system wasn't around and you could do things differently? It was the early 20th century, it was the 19th century. But this isn't the only other way things can be done. The post-World War II system is just one of the many different kinds of internationalist and supranationalist visions that we could have had at the end of World War II and that we might yet have going forward. If we can open up our imaginations a little bit in terms of how we could structure things, part of the trouble is that people don't seem to think that we can make anything new. All they seem to think that we can do is break what we have and then end up in competing nation states that are going to be in heavy security competition with each other. And I, you know, when I say all of this, I am saying this out of love and respect for the Allied states. I would never talk, you know, promote any version of this, which would make them become territories with no representation or without civil rights. The whole point of this idea is to expand the civil rights of Europeans and then to get Americans things like healthcare. That's the purpose of this.

C. Derick Varn 51:18

I'm going to ask you a question that is not mentioned in your article, but it does interest me. Do you think this kind of thinking could help us avoid a Thucydides trap with China?

SPEAKER_00 51:30

Yeah. So I think that, you know, the way that we ought to regard what's going on with China, you know, I think comes out of the article, this article for I Sonomia, the title is Your Trade Wars or Social Wars, which is a play on a book by Michael Pettis and Matt Klein called Trade Wars or Class Wars, which I think is a really helpful book for thinking about why there's a trade dispute between the United States and China. There's an imbalance of consumption and production in the world today. There are some states that have been hyper-optimized for consumption, and others that have been hyper-optimized for production. And the

China Rebalancing Beyond National Diplomacy

SPEAKER_00 52:05

states that are hyper-optimized for consumption struggle to produce efficiently and at good prices. As you were saying, U.S. manufacturing struggles to produce efficiently. But conversely, the states that have optimized for production suppress wages and suppress consumption significantly. And this creates a mutual interdependence. And it also creates a lot of dysfunction internally within the two different entities that are imbalanced. And this was talked about a lot in the Euro crisis with regard to how Germany became this very dominant manufacturing base, as the countries that were derisively and wrongfully called the pigs, you know, including Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, those states lost their capacity, their manufacturing capacities and were optimized to consume the things that Germany produced. And then this was moralized. Production was valorized as good, and consumption was condemned as bad. And then the pigs were framed as having been pigs, as having been slovenly luxuriating states that have not consumed in an efficient way. But if the European Union were constructed in a way that created a fiscal debt union, then it wouldn't have been the case that this would have been so imbalanced. There would have been a way of managing those internal imbalances in a way that would not have caused horrible disruption or cuts to social services in southern European countries. In much the same way, this imbalance, which gets moralized by people as the United States being decadent and not being able to produce, and China being virtuous and therefore having production advantages, misses, for one, the total reliance of production upon consumption. Germany becomes a dominating manufacturing power because it creates a capacity to consume in southern Europe. And in the same way, China has to create a capacity to consume in the United States to become a dominant manufacturing power. And conversely, the United States, to become this consumptive power, had to outsource a lot of production to other parts of the world, you know, so as to free its economy up to become more financialized and to become more able to move resources around in a way that would facilitate continuing consumption. So if we're discontented with this, because it's an imbalance which has had negative symptoms in both places, and the Chinese consume much less than they produce proportionally. Chinese workers are terribly underpaid relative to the value of what they produce and have a standard of living that is much restricted relative to the value of what they produce, in terms of how much room they have, in terms of their the spaces in which they live, you know, these giant apartment buildings that have these tiny flats in them, you know, it's not adequate for them either in all kinds of ways. There, I think, needs to be more cooperation to bring about a rebalancing of these things. And if this cooperation is just done at the level of nation-state diplomacy, it's not going to be sophisticated enough to successfully resolve the commercial disputes that it's trying to adjudicate, because it's going to take it in terms of national interest, and that's going to create an appearance of opposed interests when really there are a lot of people in both countries that would benefit from certain common arrangements. But in both countries, there are entrenched interests that are driven either by they benefit from the United States being very consumer-oriented, like say Walmart, or in China, the various construction companies that benefit from China being very production oriented. These sectoral interests get in the way of a deal, of an arrangement that could be mutually beneficial and could actually make more sustainable the growth in both places.

C. Derick Varn 55:54

One of the things I find very interesting is that what you're actually to me proposing is something like using the European-American allied relationship to create what would effectively be a mixture of Bangor from the Keynesian experiments that were never tried, which is to have a like neutral non-national global reserve currency. And then also what would be creation of a maybe more democratic question mark, international governing order, because the UN is not. I mean, the UN has got a thousand cul-de-sacs in it, it's not very efficient at what it does. It's if you look at its primary mission, all it's ever really done is failed. I mean, seriously, I I don't think that that that an honest leftist can could really go to bat for the UN's historical success record. And the IMF has basically been good at imposing austerity at people, which has made it very unpopular worldwide. Bricks does not really seem to be a counter order, nor, you know, despite what I hear, like I'll be frankly, utopian MMTers in the United States say that they're gonna just turn on their domestic consumption by money printing, which I'm like, A, no, they're not, and B, no, they're not. And C, that doesn't even make sense because to have their money act like uh a reserve currency the way the dollar does, they'd have to do policy like the dollar does, and that would actually destroy their domestic production capacity. And if there's no one else to do that abduction capacity in the world, then the entire world economy falls apart. What the fuck are you talking about?

SPEAKER_00 57:44

I sorry for my choice of language, but it really does seem ridiculous when you people are not thinking about it as a world system, they're thinking about it as if you have a closed system or that you could create a closed system, and it's too close to autarky, really. Well, I mean, that's the problem with monetarist autarchy, right?

C. Derick Varn 58:02

That's the problem with my problem with MMT, is it like is it operates as if autarky was possible, and its basic model is an enclosed system. I mean, the whole coat check tokenized model is basically only possible the way it's described in very simple states, which yes, kind of existed, you know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 58:24

But you know, and there are situations, there are moments in the world economy where you could do something that an MMT or suggests that you do and have it be functional. I think in the when the many of these countries were at the zero lower bound in the years immediately following 2008, you could do a lot of of uh monetary supported fiscal spending without running up on sustainable debts. But can't do it now. That's not something you could do in just any situation, certainly not when you have supply chain crises, elevated inflation rates. That's that's something that the markets are going to wear. Uh and even you know, the central banks don't cooperate with it. So you'd have to re-you know capture the central banks, and you'd have to do that, you know, against the resistance of the markets.

C. Derick Varn 59:07

Right. And then also you have to deal with the fact that no country on earth, even a relatively research high one like the United States, has everything they need to run a modern economy. You know, we don't have enough rare minerals without, I don't know, blowing up New York and mining underneath it or something. I mean, like, I'm I'm kind of joking, but I'm also kind of not. So, yeah, and yet, you know, as you point out, like the the idea that America and China are at complete odds is just not really true, since we need their mineral capacity and they need our energy. I mean, they can get energy from from Russia, but the the two things that you can for that you can say, despite all their massive planning and massive coordination and production, China's not food secure. Ever, has never been ever in its history, actually. And it's not energy secure either.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:08

Yeah. And it doesn't have the consumer base, in part because you can't have everybody in China living in these very large houses with space for all sorts of consumer stuff. There just isn't enough space in most Chinese homes to purchase and store all of the things that Americans purchase and store. Yeah, the suburban house with all of the rooms for the things that you buy that have been made all over the world, yeah, and the logistical system for distributing that, for moving it very quickly from place to place. It's a huge, you know, and the financial system for financing the debt that Americans take on to be able to sustain buying all this stuff, it's very difficult for other states to achieve anything like the same final consumption per capita, which in the United States is in excess of 40 grand, you know, final consumption per capita. And you know, in a most Allied states, it's around 25, and in China, it's around 10.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:07

And there's been strong pushback from from the from the CPC on increasing domestic consumption. Strong pushback. So when and I have some left MMT or friends who are totally baffled by this, and I'm like, I'm not, because they can't really they lose a lot of their structural leverage right now if they do that, if nothing else, because we have leverage for being the consumer of last resort, and they have leverage for being the producer of first resort. Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

Um and neither one needs to be minimized or treated, you know, with disdain or morally, you know, it talked down. These are all important roles, it's just a little imbalanced. And if there was a mechanism for cooperating, then that imbalance could be overcome and rectified. But we don't have a mechanism, and because we just naturalize the post-World War II order, or we imagine just stepping out of it into the 19th century, you know, these are really the only two things people do. There's no serious thinking about how to create structures which would actually allow the cooperation to be fruitful.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:21

So I guess the immediate thing that comes to mind, though, is we have this atavistic nationalist system activated, I think, everywhere in the world. And in fact, as I pointed out when people were complaining about Trump, I'm like, it actually manifested in Europe and Asia before it manifested here. You know, by the before the the global war on terror was even really fully winding down, we started seeing this turn towards white-wing nationalism in Europe because of the instability of immigration, from both climate change and geopolitical issues. And we also saw this from destabilization in the Philippines, leading to you know uh a want for strong domestic law and order candidates. We saw this to some degree, we've seen it in Japan, not nearly to the extent we saw it in the Philippines, but nonetheless.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:16

And we've seen it a little bit in Latin America. Yeah, there was a book by Joshua Kurlanc in 2013, I think it was, Democracy and Retreat, about all of that stuff. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:30

I suppose the thing is about like you're you kind of have this dialectic of like the way through this, you know, this imperial morass is actually ironically not decoupling, but recoupling as equals. And I think you know, you don't say this, but I think it actually implies a kind of a global skin in the game, which means new forms of cooperative governance that would be you argue, kind of forced upon the Americans by trade war. As you pointed out with the social wars, that the Italians who lost militarily, but they still got the rights and stuff that they were asking for because the the cost and inconvenience of of the war meant that the Romans were like, fine, you're citizens to shut up. Like, you know, to put it very simply, but it is effectively what happened.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:27

Yeah, and little do they know it would totally change what it meant to be Roman and make it possible for people who lived on the Black Sea to become Roman.

C. Derick Varn 1:04:34

Right. But one thing that I do I do I do wonder is how deep do you think this provincialism goes, both in the both in Europe and the United States, when proposing something like this? And do you actually think trade wars could uh mitigate against that atavistic impulse?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:00

Yeah, I think certainly it could be done. What I'm talking about is possible at the level of just could you do it? The question is, can people have this horizon or imaginarium? And not even just people, but the states in question. Can the states think about this as something that can actually empower them rather than weaken them? And to do this, we have to kind of get past the 20th century paradigm, which assumes that the way to get more autonomy is with a greater level of separation and political disintegration or devolution. A lot of the time, coming together allows you to have more sustainable differentiation at a lower level. That differentiation and plurality depends, however, on there being some level of unity at a top level. And I've written also a you know a series of pieces on supranational federalism for the strike council that kind of explored these ideas of constructing a different kind of supranational entity, not for the purposes of crushing the autonomy of people, but for the purposes of qualifying the competitive drives, you know, commercial competition with regard to capitalism, and then military competition with regard to war, so that it's possible for people to engage in forms of cooperation that currently look uncompetitive. I think the only way to make space for socialism would be something like this.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:33

I I have, you know, I have been struggling with this too, because the the socialistic impulse for because of our anti imperial drives, and in fact, anti imperialism right now is probably the dominant form of socialist engagement, even among People who aren't particularly Marxist, Leninist, or anything like that. And in situations like with Gaza and Israel, I pointed out that as long as this remains a zero-sum game, one genocide or the other is inevitable. And that that has never made people particularly comfortable. And you know, I don't want to get too far into it, but I've actually thought like it would take an international coalition to enforce this and basically force integration in that

Supranational Federalism And Socialist Space

C. Derick Varn 1:07:20

particular area. But that's what it would take. No one really wants to do that, no one really wants to commit to it, although maybe that'll change as that as that conflict spirals into greater conflict in the in the in the region. I don't know. But this idea that national autonomy actually helps you sustain national cultures or whatnot, I I think the experience of Yugoslavia, if nothing else, proves that that's not true.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:51

But yeah, and people talk about neocolonialism. There's a recognition that having independence does not guarantee you the ability to differentiate or to take a different route. And oftentimes this is thought about too much in terms of just, you know, the IMF is intervening or Western states are intervening militarily. But it's the structure. When you have a large number of competing states that are all trying to get investment, this compels them all to behave in broadly the same kind of way. If you have a large number of states that all have security concerns, this compels them to behave in largely the same way. If they protect people from these things a little bit, if you want to be able to see other kinds of behavior emerge. And I think the point that you make with regard to Israel and Palestine is insightful. If social relations don't tend to just sit where they are, if social relations aren't becoming civil relations, if there isn't political integration to come with economic integration, then economic integration tends to change the power dynamics and the relationships over time in ways that produce discontent. And then that discontent tends to result in attempts to revise the social relationship, which, if there's no civil political horizon, become hostile and militaristic. And so if we can't think in terms of the civil and the political at the level of the world anymore, because we no longer trust the post-World War II institutions, they've been seen to fail us or to impose neoliberal capitalism. So we're going to turn away from that. And we're not willing to think about any other way of structuring the world, apart from breaking apart and taking apart the various types of relationships that have previously existed. The outcome of that is going to be hostility. I don't think it will necessarily be a world war or a civil war, but I think at the very least, it would be something like Cold War II, with the United States trying to build a containment ring around China and trying to force states around the world to pick sides. And this would be terrible. It would be a horrible waste of human life, a horrible waste of our resources, you know, just a terrible waste of our potential. And it will make this whole century and our whole lives so shitty and unpleasant. You know, it doesn't have to be like this, but we do have to be able, to avoid that kind of outcome, to be able to reimagine civil and political relationships with people who are not currently part of the national territory.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:21

All right. I mean, you know, this is one of these ironies where I have talked about like, well, for example, I mean, we don't get to vote on uh US monetary policy either. It's controlled by the Fed, which is deliberately political, and liberals who previously hated that now that they're not in power, love it. That's a whole nother discussion. But I do think it's quite interesting that like there's a real truth to the fact that, like, well, U.S. monetary policy affects the entire planet, and yet they don't have a say in it at all. And you just kind of have to hope that the Federal that the Federal Reserve Board cares.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:02

And their mandate tells them not to care. Their mandate tells them to care about unemployment and inflation in the United States. And if the United States doesn't include unemployed people in Europe or Japan, if it doesn't include the inflation rate in Europe or Japan, then the Federal Reserve is bound by its rules to not care. In fact, the Federal Reserve would be disobeying its Congressional Authorization Act if it cared. And that's just such a tragic waste. And this goes back to so much of the instability in European politics is rooted in the collapse of Bretton Woods and the Nixon shock in 71, which then set the Europeans into a tailspin figuring out how do we stabilize our currencies. It forced them to create the ERM, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, forced them to create the European Union so that they could have the Euro. And then this produced a kind of forced and rushed integration on the economic level that was never properly politically thought through. And that has continued to produce crises and antagonisms, and it's had a disintegrating effect on the Europeans over time. And this is something that the Europeans recognized when the Nixon shock happened as terribly uh dangerous for them. And they've been trying since 71 to manage the consequences of that, and they're not able to do it on their own. It's a huge problem that the Federal Reserve and the Nixon administration took the view that the Europeans don't need to be considered.

C. Derick Varn 1:12:37

One of the great historical tragedies is even though I think that Keynes floated this because it was better for British imperialism, that ironically, I also think it would have been better for the world if we had had not a gold standard for for exchanges between the allies that Brendan Woods was, but a true international currency, you know, the whole Bangor idea. Then I think that ultimately would have been better for everybody, including the United States, because we now have the problems of having the B. I mean basically, we can't really do our domestic product, like, like one, it's not true that we're not productive, but we are too expensive to employ a lot of people in it. And attempts to alter that relationship, like with tariffs or whatever, actually break up our supply chains, which actually make us less productive, which has happened under the second Trump administration. Yep. So, you know, the great irony there is actually somewhat similar to the irony you're talking about. That like the one of the ways to save European life is instead of like fighting American station, go, no, we're gonna embrace it, and also we're gonna actually make demands of you for once. As similar with us, is that our attempts to renationalize our industrial production, which has been all abandoned by the Trump administration anyway, but it actually broke up our supply chains and made our own production harder and has had many downstream effects. I I do think one of the things that I really liked about your article is like we just have to admit that imperialism or not, we're in a world system, you fight it worldwide, and you can do it peacefully or you can not, but the cost to not right now, given the technologies that exist, is up to and including human extinction.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:39

Yeah, and this idea that you have a revolution in one country and then export it, you know, militarily, or you inspire a bunch of military showdowns in a lot of different places, it's a different question now versus back then. It really is, it's a much more dangerous kind of situation. You can't get people to take these kinds of risks to human life in a world with this kind of weapon system and with the legacy of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, World War II. People know about how badly out of hand these things can get. And one of the things people do all the time, they get dissatisfied with trade and with commerce and with social relations. So they go, okay, let's have military competition instead, as if that will be any better. You know, and conversely, when people get defeated militarily, they go, okay, let's have commercial competition instead. You get stuck in this back and forth between the hostile strange relationship and the social exchange-trade relationship. But you never move beyond that ping-pong back and forth between these two very limited kinds of competition that allow for only a very narrow range of behaviors. And people naturalize this and go, well, human beings just can't get along across these differences, as if it were fundamental to our cultures or fundamental to what we are biologically. But it's just because we've structured everything in this quite narrow way, and we're not able to see how narrow it is because we've been in it for so long.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:07

I think that's that's really crucial. Although, you know, I will tell you how much pushback I get when I tell people like the Westphalian nation-state is fundamentally modern, and this has not always been true. Ethnocentrism has pretty much always been true, but like that's not the same thing as a nation-state, it's just not. So it's not like we always engage in it, and and people are like, Well, what do you mean? I'm like, Well, if we always engaged totally ethnocentrically, frankly, we would be so inbred as a species we would have already died out. Like, I mean, it it it really does, you know. If you study kinship arrangements and like quote unquote primitive peoples, you start seeing like people, even when they're ethnocentric, start trying to find a way to be inclusive because even if they don't have gene theory, they kind of know that if you only marry your cousin you have problems in a few generations.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:16

What are the French? They're Celts and Romans and Franks and Vikings, too. Right. What are the British? They're Celts and Romans and Angles and Saxons and Vikings, right? What are the Germans? They're Germans and Romans, and then different Germans, and you know, and so on. And you know, the Angles and the Saxons and the Franks are all originally Germans, yeah. But people say, well, that's too far in the past, you can't reference any of that, none of that counts. Well, when do we decide that that all of a sudden these are fixed, fundamentally different ethnic essences? In modernity, in modernity, people decided all of that. That wasn't how anybody thought about things, you know, prior to just really 200 years ago. You know, even the modern state you know comes into existence before people think about it as a nation state. Natio in Latin is a much more general term that can just refer to any kind of group of anything. You know, it's in classical Latin, it's a very flexible word.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:21

Yeah, that's that's true. And an ethnoise could exist with relative autonomy in a state, you know. That's why you had stuff like ethnarchs and satrapies and and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:36

Yeah, I don't know. This was there was never a assumption that the state had to be linked in any way to an ethnos or to a NATIO. Uh, and and usually the assumption is that states would contain a lot of these things and that they could have relations on the basis of the civil law or on the basis of religious commitment at other points.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:00

I mean, you know, it kind of makes a point that I make that that I will say kind of cuts against my otherwise diehard Marxism, which is like whiteness is constructed as a failure of Christendom, like which I think is uh undeniably true, and that this is you know both super problematic, but also it was an attempt at inclusion that didn't really work until you got into the settler colonies in the United States.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:33

Yeah, and Christianity is a supplement to to Roman civil identity, and then something to make up for that when it goes, and it's you know you're no longer able to politically sustain that because the territorial entity no longer exists.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:48

I think that uh we kind of are stuck though, both both in the general public, but also in the left, because I will tell you that like in Marxism, the national question is a question that I feel like the Marxist answer makes the least damn sense. Because it's like, okay, we need to create nations even when they didn't exist so that we can build up their uh their national civic infrastructure and create nation states so we can then abolish the nation states through proletarian cooperation in an international. And just at this point, from the experience of the Soviet Union, the various Soviet national projects, we know that didn't work. Like it it did create some new peoples that really hated the Soviets that did not priorly exist. Um, but it it did not lead to this next step of like automatic integration because the proletariat would, I guess, automatically see that they have joint common interests, which I also found fascinating because you would have thought 1914 would have proven that to everybody.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:00

But yeah, and then even a lot of the you know, Pan-African or Pan-Arab projects were undermined by this, undermined by the large number of territorial states created out of the collapsing empires. Yeah, this is you know, one of the things that I like to bring up about the Middle East is that there are like three states in the Middle East that would exist independently of the breakup of the colonial empires, yeah, probably Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. And all of the other states are created out of the territories of these empires and exist mainly to get in the way of those three states and to prevent them from constructing larger political entities. And nationalism is one of the things which restrains and prevents Egypt and Turkey and Iran from cooperating with people living in the other states and frustrates any kind of pan-Arab project.

C. Derick Varn 1:21:49

Yes. I mean, people think about like the pan-they don't think about, but they should think about because I don't even think a lot of Americans know that this even happened. The the pan-Arab state attempt between the Egypt and Syria. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:01

Which lasted not very long. Right. Frustrated both by the fact that Israel exists in between the two states, but also by the fact that the Egyptians approached it with this Egyptian nationalist attitude that made it very difficult for the cooperation with the Syrians to be sustained.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:21

So I guess this brings us back to for me the lack of domestic imagination in the United States, because you and I both get called doomers all the time. We've talked about this before, because you know, I keep on telling people, no, that won't structurally work. No, that won't structurally work. No, you can't build socialism just in New York. Like City, not even New York State, just New York City. There are rational imperatives why this won't work, and by insisting on it and putting so much emphasis on it populistically or whatever, you are creating the incentives for a massive backlash.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:00

Yeah.

unknown 1:23:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:01

New York City is a financial hub that relies on its integration into the whole global capitalist system, and it has an enormous amount of existing

Why City Level Socialism Hits Walls

SPEAKER_00 1:23:09

infrastructure, which heavily limits what you what kind of form of life you can have.

C. Derick Varn 1:23:14

Right. Well, I've also pointed out though, this is also why you can't export the New York model, the New York DSA model, for example, to the rest of the country. Because I'm like, part of this is based on the fact that Mam Dani has inherited, even though Eric Adams did try to finish destroying it, a fortage infrastructure that survived even the near bankruptcy of the city in the 70s that has never existed in the southeast and in the far west, and including that is in California. So this infrastructure that you try to export to other areas, you know, electorally or whatever, will not work. Beyond that, there are two major threats to Mamdani. One, if we're quite honest, his entire ability to balance the budget, which you may have seen on social media, progressives and last is celebrating as if it was some kind of miracle. I'm like, okay, it's a re-amortization trick that you can do once, it's bailouts by the New York State government, and then it's hoping that Trump doesn't crush you by being more punitive. And what it misses, and I think you uh I was trying I've been trying to get people to look at this, and even friends of mine who I normally consider very smart don't want to, but I'm like London proves to me that this idea that because there has been a legal restriction on stock trading that creates a monopoly on the New York Stock Exchange, we know that's ending. The New York Stock Exchange itself has moved branches out to Texas knowing that like there's gonna be competition there. Once that happens, and we're not even dealing with capital flight to another country, we're just dealing with capital flight to another city and state, yeah, right, of which there is nothing legal you you can do. Right? That the entire tax apparatus of New York City collapses almost overnight.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:19

Yeah, there's nothing that compels the financial services sector to be concentrated in New York City, and it's one of the easiest sectors to move from place to place. It's you know, office space, it's not something that requires a lot of large-scale industrial engineering to move around from one place to another place. Right. It's uh which and it's not gonna happen. There's not gonna be a movement of the financial sector out. What's gonna happen is that he's never gonna do anything that will actually cause them that level of grief. He's gonna do a lot of performative stuff, like talking about taxing people's second residences that raises paltry amounts of money that poses no serious threat to that sector. It's gonna look good on social media, and he's gonna try to string enough of those kinds of things together that people don't notice that substantively very little actually changes about the city.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:10

I mean, for me, it's like Bill de Blasio but with pink paint. Which, you know, look, I would rather have Bill de Blasio than Andrew Cuomo. I know that you actually would not, but but I find this very frustrating when I'm like, there's an austerity wall coming very quickly, and you guys are ignoring the municipal bond problem that you can only re-amateurize these pension things once, you can only fix bad deals once, and the entire way this is structured is dependent on revenues going up in New York City, and there is no larger economic indicator that that is gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:54

And it's not like you could just build a bunch of data centers in New York City, all the land is being used, right? You know, I have always said, you know, if you were gonna try local socialism, the thing to do is do it in places where there's land that's undeveloped or or not very expensive that you could develop in some way that would be impressive to the people who live in the region.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:15

Yeah, here, Utah, Wyoming, or Indiana, yeah, where you also don't need that much of a political threshold to get political power.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:24

Like the Democratic Party is not well organized, and it would be easy to, you know, but they don't try these things because they are not willing to talk to the people who live in these places in such a way that they would want to take part.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:37

I mean, it it does also mean with dealing with some of the the uglier parts of the American system in the late 20th century that no one wants to talk about. Like, how did we offset deindustrialization going all the way back to the 60s? Prisons, military bases, and then the subsequent petit bourgeois apparatus to service those, which does really it does make a lot of those places pretty politically reactive. I'm not gonna lie, but it's not because people want that. I mean, if you talk to a lot of rural people, it's not like they they don't want the prison there, they just know if they don't have it, they don't have any jobs.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:13

Nobody's offered another development model. And what the Obama administration saw was that the rural counties saw negative job growth during the a recovery that they were supposed to be grateful for. So that's what they you know are expecting out of people on uh that are they're told are on the left. And until somebody demonstrates an actual capacity to generate growth in these places, why is there gonna be any trust?

C. Derick Varn 1:28:40

And and the other thing that you and I have both talked about, and you are pro federation, even at like a supernatural uh national level. I am maybe a little bit more centralist, but I admit that we live in a federalized society for you know and and country structurally, strategically, in a bunch of ways. And I'm just like, you can't do national politics from two metro poles in a in a place where you have you know 50 different subpolities and thousands of different sub-sub policies that you have no influence over, no ways to affect the legislature from. And yeah, you might get a mayor. Not I'm not just talking about Mondani, but you might get a progressive mayor. Yes, he wasn't endorsed by the DSA, which is more just their uh structural deniability claim. Uh, with Brian Johnson in Chicago, which has been a disaster because he didn't understand the bond market, or mayor Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi, who that went nowhere because Jackson doesn't control even even it's a lot of its internal municipal spending, it's sold by the state legislature.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:47

And yeah, that's the other thing that happens very quickly. You know, even before anybody would leave New York City, they would complain to Albany about anything that was making them think about doing that. And then there would be a possibility of the autonomy being rolled back, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:30:04

So, you know, what we see is because uh Mamdanny is a good politician, he's gonna frustrate his own base because they're gonna expect him to do more, and then the the ones who don't will be like, oh, well, they're so used to neoliberalism, no one's gonna hold them accountable for that. I've literally seen that argument made, and I'm like, one, why should you want that? Like, why do you want, oh, we don't hold anyone accountable for not do delivering on their promises because they nominally are were a member of the DSA and you know gotten a progressive stack once.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:37

Uh why why would they actually does anything? They just want him to serve as an inspiration to other candidates like him, and then yeah, just keep delaying and putting off the expectation that something actually gets done so that people see any sort of proof of concept indefinitely.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:54

Which has been the failure of progressive politicians since the 60s. I mean, we could even say that like it killed LaGuardia in New York all the way back in the FDR administration, because when the New Deal money ran out, so did his programs. Like, I just find this to be incredibly politically naive. And also it's you know, at a time when people are talking about anti-imperialism, and I'm like, yet you're you're you seem to be, I mean, one of the big yeah, a lot of things that people get mad about Mamdani is stuff that like, oh, he signaled something to the Zionist group that said he wasn't totally hostile to them, even though he's an anti-Zionist, or oh, he can't get rid of Tish or whatever else. And I'm like, okay, yeah, he looks like a chump because Tish is playing him, I'll give you that. But but beyond that, it's also like, well, what do you expect them to do?

SPEAKER_00 1:31:54

Like, and the sad thing is, cities could be really interesting, you know, cities could differentiate and do all kinds of different things if they had a reliable capacity to tax at a rate that would allow them to actually have enough resources to try stuff. But the only way that you're gonna have an environment where cities can do that is to have some protection against the competitive impulse to try to compete for highly mobile jobs, highly mobile tax base, highly mobile wealth. And that requires cooperation at a much higher level. But trying to do it in the cities when you've not established any of that, indeed, where the position of the higher level units is that the lower level units should be pushed into competition for the purposes of homogenizing them and getting them to behave, you know, it just conflicts fundamentally with the way the whole world system is presently structured. You know, not to mention the way the US federal government is presently structured, or the state government in many of these states.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:52

Well, I mean, I've even pointed out that you might have progressive countries suing New York for bond promises because they can do that. Because once you introduce bond reallocation, which has been a real limit in like Chicago, you open yourself up to international trade courts. It even goes beyond domestic law. And and people just will say stuff to be like, Well, that's priced into bond price. I'm like, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:21

The assumption is that no one will ever do anything like that because it would be economically insane. It's not priced into anything. You know, that stuff is considered non-credible, crazy people policy. The assumption is that no one will do it. If somebody does try to do something like that, it completely stuns the market and there's a run. Like when Liz Trust tried in the UK to do something wildly out of step. Uh, you know, it's possible to do stuff that's different, but you have to create the preconditions for that, and that's not something that can just be insisted on at the level of a city or national government.

C. Derick Varn 1:33:55

Yeah, it does require international cooperations, international. I mean, like, because things that even people imagine on the left, like when they get all super bonaparties, like, okay, well, Bernie could come into power and just forgive all these debts. And I'm like, no, he can't. Again, again, he cannot. And you're like, what? And I'm like, no, he would he'd be driven into an international court within within a few weeks, and also Congress would do it, and you probably even see him get impeached. I don't know what you what you're thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:25

At no point did Bernie Sanders say he was gonna rip up the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO. That was never part of the discussion, that was all just sitting there in the background, and nobody was wanted to ask about it or talk about it.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:41

Well, I mean, and it also deals with uh with another thing that you and I have talked a little bit about, but like like you know, you and I both believe in socialized health care, we think it's super important. I as a person who just got another surprise medical bill today, I really think it's super important. But at the same time, I have to admit that like when I hear people talk about like okay, we talk about the big beautiful bill and what it's doing to the healthcare sector and how many jobs it's gonna cost, and how much it's gonna cost the the you know US job economy. And I just go, okay, what do you think actually rationalizing the cost structure of socialized medicine would do? It would be even more devastating to the job market in healthcare. I'm not talking about you know just all the insurers and all that, although you'd have to do something with that too. I'm talking about all the logistics jobs, I'm talking about all the bureaucratic oversight, I'm talking about these, and instead, what you're seeing is financial consolidation that shouldn't even be legal, where you have single parties owning all parts of the supply chain, and occasionally you'll get someone on the left who's read some early 20th century or late 19th century stuff about socialization, say, oh, but that's good. That monopoly means they're easier to seize, and then we can just seize that monopoly and and go about it. And I'm like, okay, that was a theory in Germany in the 1920s. What happened?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:25

Like, yeah, one of the things that nobody talks about is when the socialized healthcare systems were being created in the post-burger era, healthcare was a much smaller percentage of GDP. So the amount that you had to compensate people as part of constructing these systems was much, much lower as a percentage of GDP. When you get something that's 17% of GDP, either you need an incredible amount of money or you have to engage in a lot of austerity as part of taking the thing over. And if you're going to do that, then you have to somehow deal with the unemployment that creates. You have to make replacement jobs, you have to do something else. That's going to be costly too. Now, I think all of that is worth doing, and that it can be done if you think seriously about it. But when people act like you can just, you know, magically all of a sudden have you know the government take on 17% of GDP, where currently it's only dealing with, you know, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. You know, that's just an enormous amount of the economy to deal with. If you don't have a mechanism for being able either to raise the tax base to do that, or a mechanism for being able to manage the unemployment that it generates if you cut down on the layers of waste. Yeah. And I, you know, I used to write pieces where I think through this. You know, I think I wrote Requiem for a Dream about Medicare for All for Sublation a little while back. You know, like I think you could cut healthcare in the United States to something like 14% of GDP, but this would be difficult. And you'd have to find something to do with the 3% and with the large number of people that are employed. It's doable, but it's much more doable if you do it in cooperation with other states in other parts of the world. You get common tax rules that allow you to raise the level of tax necessary without driving out your jobs and your capital. It requires a much more serious interest in coordinating with other people than has heretofore been shown by anybody.

C. Derick Varn 1:38:35

Right. I mean, and this includes the UK, which you have experience with in Canada, which I do, where I'm like, well, I mean, Canada is literally promoting suicide as opposed to like paying more to provincial healthcare systems.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:48

And if you're not even deniable at this point, you have to find a way to sustain the tax base for it. And at this point, because it's unthinkable that you'd you'd raise the tax rate, the obsession is with growth, and therefore with accommodating the tech sector, or in the case of Canada, accommodating the shale oil sector to generate enough growth to be able to sustain the health service.

C. Derick Varn 1:39:10

I agree with you. It pretty much can't be demonstrated, it cannot be done domestically. There's no domestic, there's no singular domestic constituency for it that has any power in a concentrated way. Yes, there's a diffuse demand

Healthcare Costs And The Tax Competition Trap

C. Derick Varn 1:39:22

for it. There's been a diffuse demand for socialized medicine since the fucking 50s. But uh it takes a lot to do, and it's and the other thing that I have talked about is like it as I've talked about this before, and people do not like when I talk about this, but it's the same point you made. It would have been easier to do in 1930 and set up, but even the countries that did it Britain, Canada, etc., have run into structural problems.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:52

Right, because at this point, the tax base that you need to be able to sustain a good high-quality service is not compatible with the level of growth that they're trying to attract. So you get into a lose-lose situation where either you to promote growth to fund the health service, you have to cut the tax rate to the point where you can't fund it, or to raise the tax rate to fund the health service, you lose the growth that's necessary to fund it. And so as the health service degenerates, they have to make all these compromises and privatize all of these elements. And at this point, you know, in Britain, the political consensus is that this is just going to happen one way or another. Everybody in the Labour Party is for some level of NHS privatization and for further cuts to public services. The only question is how quickly to do it, what sort of plan you should have, the degree to which you talk about it in public. It's horrible.

C. Derick Varn 1:40:47

Yeah, I mean, you know, I always tell people you don't have to look far for a dystopian future in America. You just have to look at Britain and just scale it up.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:58

Like and credit to the Brits, they talk very explicitly about the problems that they face. You know, this debate recently between Starmer and Blair, you know, where Blair writes the 5,000-word thing and Starmer writes the Substack piece. And you know, then people like Theresa May and Gove and you know Miliband, they're all saying different things about you know net zero and whether it's compatible with having the growth and having the AI and the tech companies support to achieve the growth targets. It's very honest and open discussion of macroeconomics by you know front bench or former front bench politicians in the pages of major newspapers. The quality of the discussion in the UK is still significantly higher. It's it's under siege because the reform party and the Green Party want to Americanize the hell out of the political discourse in the UK and turn it into slopulism. But right now, still in the conservative and labor parties, there's still enough vestigial norms of having a real conversation about what you're actually going to do that involves some level of public comment that you're able to actually see some of these debates. They actually still occur in a place where you can you can look at them and it's possible to track them. In the States, the conversation has become so empty with regard to all of this.

C. Derick Varn 1:42:16

Well, I I I do want to ask you, why do you think it is that there are no longer like for example? I have all my critiques of uh of elite discourse around economics, but I used to be able to read the Wall Street Journal and get the kind of news you now have to go to the Financial Times for. When I go to the Wall Street Journal now, not just in the editorial page, which has always been batshit, but you know, Chomsky back in the 90s would say, Oh, but read the actual reporting. Now the actual reporting's ideological.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:49

Yeah, the FT has become you know anti-ac for being able to have a newspaper that talks about the economy. Right, it's the last city, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:42:59

And leftists mistake it for a left-wing newspaper because it actually talks about economic issues

Why U.S. Economic Talk Got Worse

C. Derick Varn 1:43:03

in a real way. And I'm just like, it's not a they know that leftists read it.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:08

Sometimes they do include little sops, yeah, yeah. Um winks and nods. They like to do that sometimes. They they know that it's part of their subscriber base.

C. Derick Varn 1:43:19

But it is it, I did find it very interesting and it was very telling that that you know, and this is not true for for brittle the general British newspapers. I think I think in general British newspapers are really bad, but not the the political discussion parts of it. By that I mean like the on the debates you're talking about between politicians that happen on the press, and also I will say BBC and channel, you know, British television anchors and whatnot are willing to take oppositional stances to politicians in ways no one in America is, because of fear of losing their their their their audience because they're effectively audience captured, but the audience actually is so effectively politically captured that in part because the the MPs are always competing for leadership positions and front bench positions, so you can attack a particular person and have it be to the benefit of other people in their party.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:16

So it's not as if if you attack a Democrat, you must be helping a Republican. If you attack, say Andy Burnham, you're potentially helping Keir Starmer, you're potentially helping Wes Streeting, you're potentially helping somebody else, maybe Angela Rain or Ed Miliband, who might think that they ought to ultimately end up in the chair. So there's ways to do it that still seem to be potentially to the benefit of other members of the political class.

C. Derick Varn 1:44:41

Well, I think this incentives is important to think about because you and I have both also been on a kick where I hear about utopian fixes to the two-party system. Like if we only had rank trust voicing or if we only had mandatory, the big one 20 years ago is mandatory voting, and I'd be like, Ireland and Australia. Their problems about these things are not as acute as ours, but they still exist. They still have depoliticization, they still have anti-politics, they still have a vulnerability to slopulism. It is not fixed by these reforms, it isn't exacerbated by it. I'm not saying these reforms would be bad, but they don't fix what you're saying they're going to fix.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:26

Yeah, all the same trends are still affecting all of these states. The European states are all have these programs under siege by the competitive international environment with no political integration. It affects everybody, no matter what reforms you have. And one of the things that drives me crazy is that people will say, will blame the lack of these reforms. And then they'll always say, Well, of course, those reforms wouldn't be enough anyway. And they always try to have it both ways. And they'll often write pieces, you know, talking about how horrible and terrible it is that in the European countries things are being rolled back. And they'll say at the same time that those reforms would be the silver bullet if you enacted them here, you know, and then they'll say, Well, of course, it wouldn't be a silver bullet, you would still need to do all sorts of other things. You know, so should people be caring about this? Should it be a priority? There's no serious thinking about it. And I think it's in part because people tend to just write whatever it is that they can sell currently to one of the magazines. If there's a moment right now where people are looking for excuses or explanations for why this or that candidate didn't win, something about dark money will always sell with one of the magazines. You know, something about the voting system will always sell for one of the magazines when a candidate loses an election that people think should have won as an excuse for why they lost.

C. Derick Varn 1:46:47

Well, even the Sanders campaign has dark money at this point. What are you guys on? Like, like, you know, I've covered all the weird money that shows up in like you know, R Revolution and whatnot, post-R Revolution super PACs, and and and the the way they intersect with with you know millionaire and billionaire money even now. And I'm like, well, this seems to me to be frankly a revitalization of the status quo by pretending you're opposing it, and it is not it's not politically viable. And I agree with you, uh, like what you know, people think, oh, well, you mean raising taxes on on you know everybody. I'm like, to some degree, yes, but actually, what I really mean is stopping tax competition, and like it infuriates me that these data centers are getting sweetheart deals where they can just farm things and then not pay local property taxes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:51

Not just tax breaks, not just subsidies, but oftentimes actual spending that's done to facilitate infrastructure spending to facilitate and make cheaper the building of stuff. And like people are complaining the other day in British politics about infrastructure spending more than a billion pounds to facilitate the building of a universal resort.

C. Derick Varn 1:48:13

Yeah, and it's just just it's just it's maddening to me. I mean, in the United States, we now have more money being spent on AI infrastructure than on any other infrastructure at all. And like I've been pointing out, there's a capex weakness in this. I'm not people will take me as saying this is somehow I'm anti-AI. I'm actually not, but I am anti-the way AI is being implemented and rolled out and and thought through because I, like you, think this could be a radical technology that we could all benefit from in real ways. It doesn't, it is not teleologically oriented that way because it's not designed to be right now, but it could be. We could we could we could set up these data centers smarter, we could start trying to deal with the energy cost uh, you know, by putting efficiency incentives into the learning models themselves, as the Chinese did because they were forced to at DeepSeek. There's all kinds of things we could do, we're not doing them, and then you know, my my favorite cockamami thing that I see right now is seeing Sam Bikeman free get on stage with Bernie Sanders, not for the nationalization of AI, which you and I both know would not happen for a variety of structural reasons, even though I would like support it if it could happen, it's not going to, not in the current environment, but like this 50-50 shared thick stake thing. And I'm like, okay, so that's just gonna tie us all into managing data centers at the expense of the rest of the economy in some ways, because now we have to keep it profitable to keep both stakes up, and you know, the the the AI infrastructure is already tied in the military-industrial crop plow packs like crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:55

Does the state need more incentive to hyper focus on that particular sector at the expense of everything else?

C. Derick Varn 1:50:02

Yeah, it's just it just seems like this sounds good if you don't as if you're thinking only one step ahead. And what I liked about your article about thinking about trade wars and social wars is it is really about thinking four or five steps ahead instead of just one. Because I think right now, and this is even true for capital, like I've thought a lot about like you know the the liberal imperative on capitalism and its long term development and all that, and how it seems like now, because of some very technical things that I could explain in Marxology, but I won't because I'll spare my listeners who have to deal with that all the time anyway, that we don't really have. Have a good vision for profitability in ways that uh would help the general economy. And I I mean that literally by why the AI numbers went kablooey in the last few weeks. And it's because there was positive job growth. And now it's positive job growth in shitty jobs that can't outpace inflation, but there was positive job growth. And then the AI market started tanking immediately. And I was like, that plus a little bit of pushback on the SpaceX IPO from the SP 500 seemed to just crack, you know, this CapEx problem. And then all of a sudden it's like I was telling people, well, it is gold comfort that we have to rely on the rationality of certain sectors of capital for stability to stop self-accountabilization at this point. Like and we're selling that to the future, but but then you know, I'm like, do you really expect though people to just you know, right now the the best the best argument against AI is it's not actually more efficient than human labor, and that's right now mostly true depending on the sector you're talking about. That won't always be true. And I I do wonder what people think that means.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:19

Yeah, and part of the trouble is people think, you know, that they're that what we're talking about when we say human labor is what's fundamentally valuable about human beings. You know, so when people say, oh, AI can do this work, they they seem to be devaluing what human beings can do. But I think people have to remember that a lot of the jobs that currently exist do not make full use of human capacities, they are predicated on human beings who have, you know, can be stunted in various kinds of ways, but nonetheless can do limited kind of functional job because they have a limited kind of functional education that has trained them to do these limited things. A lot of the work that we're you know talking about getting rid of is not work that allows for full human flourishing or development, you know. So yeah, I think this is important, be a good thing.

C. Derick Varn 1:53:08

Yeah, I think this is important because I've talked about like, yes, I do agree that the way we're currently using AI leads to cognitive degeneration. Here's the thing that's because it's we're we're using it in that particular way. I mean, like, there's also truth to the fact that just having books means that I have less of a memory than an ancient, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:53:26

You don't have to memorize an oral, you know, the whole text of the Odyssey and be able to repeat it. You know, they used to really value that, you know, even when writing was a thing when it wasn't completely widespread, yeah. Reciting poetry was a huge part of ancient education, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:53:43

And and also people like oh, poetry might no dude, poetry was like how you taught people how to farm. Like go back and read those those bucolics and and and whatnot. They weren't all just about celebrating nature, they were also telling you how to do animal husbandry and grow shit.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:03

Yeah, it's in part because poetry, yeah, helps you remember to make it beautiful, helps you remember these important things, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:54:12

And and I I I I tell people that like I do agree with you that AI is doing the things you're saying is doing right now, and I don't think it's worth the current power, water, and energy cost, but the idea that it has to be this way is also a limiting, like, so our options are to either forgo this technological development altogether and go back to more tedious forms of human labor because it's more because it's more labor consumptive, and that somehow that'd be good, or to or to like continue developing it the way it's being developed, which is going to be a massive energy suck, and it's not yet currently all that super helpful for for very many things. And I I hate to tell you guys that this is to come back to your point of your essay. You also can't control this in one nation. As long as this is a national project, you you're gonna be in a red cream grain with nations that do use it. You you would have to come up with an international framework for how to incorporate and limit this, and that requires such an international framework to exist, which is why all these like radical decouplings and whatnot don't work for me. I I was thinking about this when I was talking to someone earlier today about you know degrowth ecosocialism. I consider myself an ecosocialist. People mistake me for like a bright, you know, developmental eco-socialist, and I'm not. But I also say, like, well, do you really think you're gonna be able to control the environment by municipal decentralized agriculture? Because that is what the a lot of people put on offer. I was actually laughing that despite all the Marxology, Kohe Seto just used marks to arrive at the same thing Murray Bookchin did 30 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:11

Yeah, and you know, meanwhile, you have people who are currently hungry in Sri Lanka because of rising oil prices, making it difficult for them to get food. Yeah, these are people who just don't exist in these discussions, they're not taken seriously as mattering. The stuff that happens to them is not treated as important. It's just terrible. Yeah, the level of talk about that because it's a global food system that requires an enormous amount of yield to have prices on the current market system that are low enough for people in developing countries to be able to buy food for their kids.

unknown 1:56:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:46

And none of this is seriously reckoned with.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:49

No, I mean, like the idea that we're gonna move somehow overnight move. I think my my the most the most strange one is the half-horse socialism possibilities. Like, we're gonna rewild half the planet, how are you gonna do that? We're gonna mandate global veganism, how you're gonna do that, when you've also decentralized um agricultural production, so you can't really move stuff from one place to the other. And there's plenty of reasons what there's plenty of regions where veganism really isn't possible without a global food chain. You're you're like, I'm sorry, it sounds like you might accidentally pull pot Cambodia like half the planet.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:25

Yeah, and to your point about the AI, you know, the the only person who has tried to say anything about how AI might be governed at a global or international level is the only person in high politics who runs an international structure, which is the Pope. Yeah, yeah. And we have such a dearth of imagination at the international level that the Pope is running at a plus 30, you know, net rating, simply because he's talking about at the level of the planet doing something about this.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:00

Right. And and while it's read as like like what it is, he's not even saying that.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:05

He's no, no, it many people have criticized it from the other direction that it's too positive about AI because he doesn't regard AI as something which can uh feel love or can engage in you know choices about final ends. So he doesn't see it as a threat to be able to do those things. Uh so the people who think that AI is conscious regard him as being naive or a useful idiot for the you know the the uh Skynet.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:34

Oh boy. Oh man, the consciousness debates about AI just make my brain hurt. Although ironically, sometimes I wonder if like now you guys have proven to me that maybe people aren't conscious, but I that's obviously an absurd premise.

unknown 1:58:52

Um but anyway.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:56

I do think I I I do think though, I I really like this article, not not just because I want people to think about what internationalism would look like, and maybe even a reframing of what anti-imperialism is, other than decoupling. Because the one thing I will say is no no power has ever wanted decoupling for very long. I mean, like, how did China become the the the miracle that it became in poverty reduction after you know after the collective period did not work, although it did it wasn't as bad as people said it was, I will say that, but it didn't work, was integrating into the global financial economy, and then people will be like, Oh, well, they did it on their own terms, like, yeah, they did, but they still integrate into the global financial economy, and you have a communist state with billionaires in it.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:49

I don't know and they were welcomed in, they were welcomed into the WTO, they were given, you know, they were welcomed by Richard Nixon. There was an attempt to bring them in in part because of concern about the Soviet Union and belief that bringing them in would be helpful. It did generate an enormous explosion of cheap consumer goods in North America in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, which was part of what allowed for the delegitimation of the Soviet Union because it wasn't able to produce cheap consumer goods internally and it didn't have access to a market to which it could outsource, and it remained in hack to its heavy industry, which it couldn't displace, and yeah, et cetera, et cetera.

C. Derick Varn 2:00:29

And Kriso got caught up in IMF loans. But I mean, I I I think also that it that allowed, I mean, it allowed American development, it allowed neoliberalism to seem viable in some ways because the the cheap commodities that it that it was able to produce after you know the globalization of the currency also enabled us to be able to ignore service inflation.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:58

And this I've been trying to you know for a while get people to understand China's growth is part of neoliberalism. China is neoliberalism, it's just a part of neoliberalism that we don't talk about or think about as part of neoliberalism. But the whole transformation of China occurred in and through what we call neoliberalism out here.

C. Derick Varn 2:01:21

I would even say it happened through both neoliberalism and ordoliberalism, and I think people underestimate how severe it was because I'm like, they stopped funding the education of girls in the countryside, guys. Like it was pretty severe.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:34

And it used to be that neoliberals would argue for neoliberalism on the basis that it was lifting people out of poverty in China. They used to explicitly argue for it on that basis, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:01:44

And also, leftists used to explicitly critique China on that basis. See David Harvey's book that he's now recanted that part of. But it just seems to me I don't want to get too deep into like inter-left stuff, but there seems to be like this attempt to pretend that like the tensions in the communist sphere of the world didn't happen, so we can so we can just pretend that like China is socialist and is not implicated at all by by neoliberalism today, or yeah, they didn't pretend that it's it's been Maoist the whole time, right? Yeah, it didn't help with the global war on terror and like all kinds of stuff, and and also that they were super copacetic with the Soviet Union, except for that dirty Khrushchev, and that's the only problem that ever happened, and you know, they totally want undermining socialist movements in other countries to help the Americans as part of that trail, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:02:42

And these are these are weird sectarian groups that have fringe views that require ignoring things that you can discover in a Wikipedia article, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:51

But they do, I will tell you, amongst amongst Zoomers, they have a lot more important. They I will say they don't have the sticking power, so you see these things come up, and these like fads of like ignoring certain trends will pop up, fly through the the internet, and like you'll have 20 of weird radicalized Zoomers picking it up, and then they will kind of I don't know, read a book and realize that it's more complicated than that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:19

But they won't say anything about it. So I put my faith in the ability of the young people to read. You know, the young people who can read will never stick with this kind of stuff for very long because it's too brain dead and it conflicts too much with stuff that you can easily discover by opening relatively simple, easy-to-read books, not even anything complicated. The people who actually will fall into this stuff and get suckered by it are people who are not gonna be of any use to any movement in any case, anyway, because their ability to think about stuff and read and engage with anything is so limited that you know they're really just being conditioned by watching videos on the internet.

C. Derick Varn 2:03:56

I'm gonna ask you a question where this area is an area where I pick up a lot of points from Freddie Debore, but diverge from him because he doesn't think there's a problem, and I do. I agree with him that it's not merely an educational problem, that it's a social problem, but I think it's a severe problem, and that is like literacy of all sorts, not just traditional literacy. I mean, media literacy, numeracy, etc., is in rapid freefall. And before people just, oh, it's stupid Americans, it's worldwide. With China being kind of an outlier, but only kind of. It's still happening, there's just not a severe.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:33

Yeah. And even in the places where it hasn't happened to the same degree, the education systems in these countries are under heavy pressure to adapt reforms that will have these effects. You

Literacy Collapse And Short Form Video

SPEAKER_00 2:04:43

know, Keir Starmer is considering equipping all of the kids who are falling behind with you know AI assistance on tablets. Yeah, and none of this is proven, and there's no reason to think this will help any of them, but it will generate revenue for the tech companies and it's an attractive SOP to them, and it makes it seem like he's doing something about the problem. Yeah. I just love how there is a serious educational issue, very serious, particularly for anybody who's interested in a kind of mass politics. You know, if you're an elite theorist who thinks that you can get what you want with some you know, tiny number of people who are able to read, then it's a different story. But for anyone who's got any interest in anything large scale, it matters greatly that we've got uh, you know, a population that is becoming less literary, that is becoming more dependent on the video form, and also which increasingly can't even watch full-length movies or full-length sports games, but is limited in terms of the attention span to short form video. That's the next level. And the sports leagues are already concerned about this. They can't get kids to watch full-length basketball or baseball games. And how do you monetize the short form video content for these sports leagues, which they've typically given out for free, imagining it will get people to watch full-length games and to pay for cable and pay for streaming services and so on? It's a major problem, not just the pivot to video, but the move to short form video, which no one has been able to compete on without producing extraordinarily stupid content. If you look at what dominates Instagram or TikTok or YouTube Shorts, it's incredibly thick, very, very dumb stuff that is able to compete within the very short form.

C. Derick Varn 2:06:33

Absolutely. I can tell you this from experience because I tried to start cutting my videos in the short form as an advertiser for it for long form, and I quit doing it because the short form people didn't come, they did not watch the long form videos. The responses I got were antagonistic, and people could not understand my arguments and thus just called me stupid. And I'm like, okay, well, where if we can go this force decides, and if you ever see me, then run. Like if you really want to go this way, then like the way that you this actually is because I just have to physically dominate you. And while I'm 40 something and probably can't do it as easily anymore, I am trained with the mauser, so you should consider what you're doing. Um, and they're like, and I'm like, I I I think violence is stupid, so I don't want to go there. But if you really think that that's how you're gonna integrate it, like violence becomes the only parasocial, I mean the only social option. And I do think this is really bad for the left because I do think a lot of these memeified things get brought up, but I unfortunately what worries me is you see left academics kowtow towards it a little bit because they think they need you to stay relevant, that maybe they can sneak in some smarter stuff later. But I just gave up on it because I'm like, I just don't want to I don't want to argue with people just calling me dumb because they don't understand my argument because I can't listen to a more than three-minute clip. And I can give you two depressing anecdotes that are not proof of anything, but they are ubiquitous enough that I have a problem. I'm a teacher in Utah. You think doing the cannabis that I do, that would be a problem. The reason why it's not is my students do not have the attention span to watch my videos, and this includes honor students. I've had several tell me I found your stuff, it was interesting, but I couldn't watch something for more than 10 minutes. So your videos are too long. Like, what are you doing making 15 or 30 minute videos? And I'm like, I make three and four hour videos, sweetie. Like, um, like because some of the stuff can't be distilled, and like, well, if you can if you know something, you can make it simple. I'm like, no, some stuff you really can't, not not like that, not in a matter of time, as well as a matter of explanation, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:44

And then there's the whole dialogue form. You know, a lot of podcasts, there's a dialectic, there's a dialogue, a back and forth that develops that it requires a certain amount of of movement in the conversation that you can't simply produce or command in a short unit of time. Uh, you know, and I, as much as I like making one hour or two-hour long podcasts, I always think that my books are the best things I make. And only a small percentage of the people who watch my stuff on the internet actually buy and read my now very cheap legitimacy and liberal democracies with Edinburgh University Press. You know, but to me, you know, that is the best thing that I've ever made. And it's because I can actually sit with each line, I can try to make sure that all of the stuff fits, that my usages of words fit together across a very large space of text. I have time to be able to work through tensions in my argument and figure out how I want to deal with very, very complicated issues that there's just no way you can do that in an extemporaneous format, no matter how much reading and how much writing and talking you do outside of it, you know, you can bring some of that to it, but you can never bring as much to any kind of video, even a long form video, as you can do with a book. And the crazy thing to me is that there's you know, the people who read books, there's the people who watch long-form videos, but this is a niche thing, long-form video now. Long form video is around where the novel was in the 60s. It's something that you do if you're you know a little bit educated, you know, you fancy yourself a kind of educated, a little bit, you know, artistic person, but it's no longer the primary way in which culture is disseminated and developed. You know, now we're you know to the short form video and that the edit, you know, the thing that the really young kids love are those edits with the music, and and this is just all about a vibe. It's like you know, mystery ritual cult stuff from late antiquity, you know, that's just about creating a woo-woo kind of sensation in a lot of these videos. Yeah, all these like hard, hard style remixes of songs, you know, that are you know, this kind of booming of fascistic beat and then the military imagery and all of this.

C. Derick Varn 2:11:04

Oh, yeah, I've I find this weirdly fascinating, but also found that like what you do see a lot of times on short form videos is like zoomer women who are obviously positioning themselves as sex objects, also trying to sneak news in. Like, I'm just like, okay, like wow. And I I don't want to sound like that there's no counter tendencies in Zoomers. There are. There are the I have known people to get fed up with this and go read books, really truly, but it is no longer the general trend. And to support your point on long form video, not even in like what we're doing, not like in this long talk show format, but like in a narrative format. I used to teach only for uh from 2019 to about a year ago, uh a Lytton film class that when I first offered it, because it allowed you to read two books and watch a bunch of movies, was so in demand that we could we had to cap it because like it was like 200 people wanted into the course. I had trouble getting 40 kids into it now, and I quit, I actually passed it on to another teacher because it was so hard to build up because so many kids did not want to do it. And it was clear that many of the kids in the class were were actually not watching the videos and relying on AI summaries. And also, when I told them to review the video, they confused an AI summary with a review and didn't understand why I was like, no, you a review is not you just telling me what the thing is about, which you obviously didn't even watch it anyway.

SPEAKER_00 2:12:45

Yeah, and people used to do this with. Spark notes and novels, and now it's all the way down to you know movies, the thing that used to be the break and the easy thing, the layup. You know, now this is impossible to get people to actually do. It's a huge problem. Yeah. And no, it's not the case that we can just rely on short form video content to reinvent art and culture in some other form such that everybody gets the same benefit. It does matter that people be able to conceptualize concepts, you know, develop what they think an abstraction means and apply it. And you have to be able to write to do that, and to be able to think in a precise and methodical way. And video, the image, doesn't generate that kind of thinking. It generates a vibe, it generates a kind of it's more like a psychedelic experience relative to the text.

C. Derick Varn 2:13:43

Absolutely. And I do find the idea that we can't do anything about this frustrating because I'm like, no, we can't fix it. We cannot fix it just with formal education. That is absolutely true. I agree with Freddie on that. But I'm like, the idea that we just can't do anything is foolish. But I do think to come back again, it would take international coordination to just say, okay, this is junk food. You can have a little bit of it, but it cannot be the majority of consumption. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:14

Like yeah, it would take coordination. But you know, people just act like anytime one of these things happens, the whole post-World War II order is to be taken for granted. And if it's replaced, it will be with terrifying nationalism. And those are the only choices. So you have to cling on to this post-World War II system that can't protect us from any of these things, much less empower us to do anything to make a world that's actually worth living in.

C. Derick Varn 2:14:41

I do think that if I have like my my strategic failure of the left in its imagination, is frankly, and you know, I wrote a whole book on this now with Daniel Tutt. And I will also say writing's really helpful. Writing with someone else is really, really helpful because they can tell you when you're full of shit, and you have to like make some concessions. If not a co-writer, you need a really good editor. But because you know, there's there in writing, there's a dialectic between the sociality of it and the individuality of it that comes out because it's an individual act you kind of have to do, even when you're collaborative writing. I still have to like write down things by myself, even when I'm working with someone else. But then I have to take all the social learning, all the dialogic stuff that comes before before that. You know, for me, years of talking on podcasts, like decades actually of talking on podcasts, being distilled down in engagement with other thinkers. And what was a relatively short book because I one because it's easier to publish, and two, because I think people might read it, maybe. Um but uh it's really important that we do this, and I think you know, one of the things I've told people is like, well, if you ever been on like left TikTok or left Instagram, if you think left Twitter's bad or left Facebook was bad, the vapidness and easy manipulation of the of of like left of the left video formats and short form really is under discussed. People might complain about bread tube versus bread tube or any of that, but I'm like, all that's actually not as relevant as it was six years ago, and this has happened really, really quickly. I mean, yeah, the lit the fact, and I really did, and this I will sound like uh you know, even though I'm not anti-AI, I'm not anti-video, obviously. How could you but yeah, but the domination of short-form videos is perfectly correlated with the decline in literacy in the developed world, it is like one-to-one correlations, even down to the date you started seeing it. And before that, there was an argument to be made that actually, even though you weren't building up extensive reading skills or intensive reading skills like close reading, you weren't getting that from the internet. But people were reading more on the internet and the aughts and early aught teens, even if they were reading less novels, which was problematic for points of intention and long and long-form debate, but at least they were reading.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:17

And when you got to TikTok, Instagram, and Vines, that started dropping off precipitously worldwide, because it's not just short content, it's short content that's designed to get you to watch each, you know, to keep watching more short content. So when you start with it, it's well, I'll just watch a short content, a short thing, and then I'll get back to my serious stuff. But it's designed to hook you on that. So you think you're only committing a very small amount of time to it, and then before you know it, an incredible, an incredibly vast amount of time is gone. And it used to be that in these kinds of windows, when people wanted something to do, they would have to embark on something that if they wouldn't finish it in that unit of time, they would make a significant contribution to it. They would start a book, they would read a chapter of a book, that you know, that you would you would do something more serious in those intervals. Or when you wanted a break, you know, you'd you'd get a magazine, you'd get something that gave you something more substantive to deal with. And now, because you have this easy option of just in any situation without paying any kind of subscription fee, without purchasing any kind of specific volume, you just have these short-form videos. People waste entire days of their life, you know, huge amounts of time on this stuff that doesn't stick in your brain, doesn't teach you anything, doesn't make you a better person. And encourages intellectual swath because since it feeds you stimulus very, very readily without you having to engage with it on any level, it degrades over time a lot of the intellectual muscles which come from trying to find meaning and make connections out of something longer and bigger.

C. Derick Varn 2:19:01

Yeah. I mean, it people understand this when you talk about the effects of modernity on your physical body and on like muscle mass and whatnot. They don't, they they really ignore it on brains. And I don't, and again, neither one of us, I want to be very clear, neither one of us are anti-technology, neither one of us are Luddites. Like, I know this about you. I know that obviously my entire project will be hyper paradoxical if I was. But I do think it's a real problem because I I I think a point you made back like a half an hour ago, and this will be my last point. I one of the things that makes me somewhat unique amongst Marxists, and it's not in my book, but it is in a lot of the thinking that went into my book, is this complexity system thinking notion about specialization that you invoke more and more high-level energy, intellectual energy to specialization, and you see a general degree degradation of skills, until you have an elite that are so specialized they can't really think outside of very, very, very narrow constraints. And then you have a general public that also can't really do anything and so specialized when there's an economic change, they can't really adjust. That there really is no other option for them because they spent you know their lives specializing on this very specific humanly limited skill that you know, as you were talking about, it's actually kind of mind-numbing. And you do need some of this complexity and division of labor and whatnot for a complex society. I I don't know how how you don't have it, but to the extent that we have it today, it leads to both an incompetent general public and an incompetent elite that is not incompetent on its specialization, but its specialization is so narrow that you know what else can they do? And I think that does lead to them, like even the business sector and even the military, which is an area that I used to think had natural checks against this, being easily come by grifters because no one has enough to scalt information and knowledge and general skills to put it all together to see how to deal with the grifting.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:09

Right. So then you don't have a coherent unit that's capable of cradding, you know, that you don't have an Aristos, you don't have a demos, you don't have a unit that can cradd, and you're path dependent, and you're just struck stuck following institutional and structural imperatives that you lack the capacity to revise. Right.

C. Derick Varn 2:21:28

Well, I mean, and Tainter says these systems just die. Like he doesn't say it's inevitable. He has like nine examples in history where they don't, but he's like, but more often than not, they collapse but due to their energy needs and overspecialization.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:45

Modernity is that you know, modern systems are designed explicitly with less virtuous people in mind. You know, these modern systems were created after Montesquieu's Persian letters, you know, after Vico's new science, with a view to how do we create a social system that is operable by people who are degraded with regard to their capacity for political activity, with regard to their ability to collectively cooperate and take decisions together, who, when they try to do this, tend to get into civil conflict with each other

Modernity’s Limits And Elite Degeneration

SPEAKER_00 2:22:15

of the kind your Hobbes describes in Bahamas. Yeah. People who we're going to design a world where they don't have to think about fundamental values, because if they think about that, they'll get into conflicts with each other. Where not only do they not have to think about it, but we ensure to some degree that they don't think about it because we regard this tendency as dangerous in people. And insofar as it reappears, likely to result in totalitarian or horrific, you know, abusive, tyrannical acts. Yeah. So the thing that's really bizarre about modernity is that it's designed to be compatible with degenerated people. And as we keep going further and further in modernity, we make people who are less and less able to independently organize stuff. And we just keep trying to find out can modernity work with people who are even less able to do this kind of stuff than the previous generation of people who are even less socialized and even less able to independently cooperate? You know, how how degenerated can people be and have modern systems still work? How advanced is this new science of modernity? Can it take on board and work with even extraordinarily limited, narrow subjects?

C. Derick Varn 2:23:27

Well, the problem that I think you have is something that Peter Churchin and Co. turn out, which is you have both an overly competitive and degenerated elite, too. And so this idea that Modernity is like, okay, we're gonna include everyone in politics. Oh shit, that doesn't work. So now let's create a politics so we can all seem included and all have a say, but not have any effect on anything. And I I do think this is the great irony of like liberal democracy. You and I both say we've said this both explicitly, if you think you're gonna get rid of the administrative state, you're on crack. But but, you know, particularly immediately, like that's not gonna happen overnight. But at the same level, it is odd to me when I hear the great Star Warts of defending democracy from the progressive left defend the administrative state, and until very recently, because it's been taken over by reactionaries, the judiciary, the two least democratic areas of government. And I'm just like, you really don't have faith in civil institutions, which sometimes actually do what you want, but you don't even have faith to let that happen.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:37

Yeah, there's a real tension between modernity and republicanism, and the attempt to unite those things has always been very fractious.

C. Derick Varn 2:24:46

Yeah, it's uh I guess part of me is a small R Republican in that, like, I don't feel like we have any other way to have mass politics, which is what you'd need for class equalization. And I do get the frustrations with with, you know, okay, well, you know, every cook may be able to govern, but they can't run a nuclear submarine. I'm like, okay, I get your point. Um, but also if you have a non-competitive elite class, they also eventually won't be able to run the nuclear submarine, but they have the keys to it. So yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:25

I the question is can we use can we create modern structures which create space for the development of human capacities as opposed to just narrowing and emptying people into more and more specialized worlds? Is there a way to bend modernity around a little bit to the point where it generates a flourishing of people's abilities as opposed to just a closing up?

C. Derick Varn 2:25:46

And if the answer is no, I don't know that there's a human future, which by the way, some of our tech overlords have just decided that no, there isn't, and that's okay. And I'm like, um, you know, I mean, Peter Thiel has almost all explicitly stated that maybe like the world would be better without people in it if it was only run by our profit maximizing robots. And I was like, Oh, who's that world even for?

SPEAKER_00 2:26:12

Like um, but anyway, um, these guys are disgusted by their own employees, they're disgusted by the people that they themselves have shaped and helped to create.

C. Derick Varn 2:26:23

Oh, yeah, it's it's it's it's hilarious that, like, oh no, the socialization that we impose on you, we don't like it. Um but I mean, I I do think this is something that I have critiqued Marxism for, was the assumption that more and more centralization would always lead to more and more socialization and skilling of labor, which has just seems to have reached its zenith in the 1960s.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:48

Like, and at this point, skilling and socialization don't obviously go together at all, right? Like like yeah, completely unrelated to each other almost.

C. Derick Varn 2:26:59

Um indeed, maybe even opposed. So thank you, Ben, for your time. We've been talking for about two and a half hours. Where can people find your work? Where are you writing these days?

SPEAKER_00 2:27:10

Yeah, it's been delightful. I'm I'm you can find uh on my about page on BenjaminStudybaker.com, most of the stuff that I write externally. I've also got a Substack these days that uh where I write stuff more informally. And you know, of course, I am very keen to, and I'll do it one more time, plug my paperback of legitimacy in liberal democracies, which is the best thing I've ever made, and it's currently the cheapest any book I've ever published uh has been or is likely to be for quite some time.

C. Derick Varn 2:27:40

Yeah, I would I would tell people read that book. I was super enamored with it. Because I I do think if we don't do the it actually speaks to the question of my book with Daniel Tut, which

Where To Find Ben’s Work

C. Derick Varn 2:27:52

is like, why does dumb populism keep on emerging, left, right, and center?

SPEAKER_00 2:27:57

Yeah, and why is that pluralism stuff in my second book? I think really maps on well. And and I think it's an interesting, especially because you come at it with a very different literature from what I uh tend to draw upon in that second book. So we come on to some of the same themes from very different bodies of of literature, it's very interesting.

C. Derick Varn 2:28:16

Yeah, I was actually thinking about that because I was like, you and I come like I come from almost a structural economic, like mostly Marxist analysis. Daniel comes at it from like from a Marxist psychoanalytic and sociological way, and you come at it from like a structural structural functionalist. I should not say structuralist because it has a very specific meaning, a structural functionalist analysis of of the way states interact. That we've all kind of come on to similar problems and why this populism keeps on emerging and why it can't do anything. Because essentially, what it's promising, I think we all agree, is impossible under current constraints. But then when that fails, people don't try to imagine something new, they just flip back to like, well, another world is not possible.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:01

Woe is me. I have to compete in elections, and I do I can't come up with a strategy that wins elections other than populism, therefore, I'll just reinvent populism again. That seems to be where people are at.

C. Derick Varn 2:29:13

Yeah, I I uh I literally thought that because I'm like uh Anton and Anthony Borriello and uh Anton Jaeger, like were like a year ago, were declaring left populism dead, and I'm like, Well, it was, and then Mondani won, and we are right back in the cycle of people trying to do this again, and you're even seeing them dust off Muffin Laclau again, and like uh I could I could go on for a whole hour just about Move and Laclau.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:42

Like well, I think it's terminally damaged a lot of Marxist phrase. But um, but yeah, if they you know, I don't like to blame theorists for things because of course the things that happen have structural causes. But if I was gonna blame theorists for things, Laclau and Move.

C. Derick Varn 2:29:59

Yeah, I I also think one of the things leftists need to do, and particularly Marxists who say they care about structural things, is quit like blaming stuff on intellectual genealogies. However, um, I I I also agree with you, I would make a special exception for Laclau and move because it did feel like oh, I you just came up with a left justification for utter capitulation and made it look like it wasn't that. Like um, but anyway, thank you so much, Ben. I really enjoyed this conversation, and you will probably be back on the show eventually anyway. So thank you for your time. Thanks for having me. It was great, it was fun.