#1675 Fighting Nihilism to Organize For Freedom Against Fascism (Transcript)

Air Date 12/10/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. In a moment of darkness, it's important to not only look for a light, but also to understand how to create your own. Today, we're exploring the philosophy of tragic optimism, the differing frameworks of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to', and the nature of the slow progress of democracy, but also the organizing strategies that are themselves the best coping mechanisms and path to progress.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes includes Dasia Sade, Millennials are Killing Capitalism, Why, America?, The Agenda, and Unf*cking the Republic. Then in the additional deeper dives half the show, there'll be more in just two sections today: Section A: Organizing, and Section B: Coping.

The Tragic Optimist's Guide to Surviving Capitalistic Nihilism - Dasia Sade Part 1 - Air Date 11-29-24

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: Capitalistic Nihilism is that creeping sense of disillusionment when you realize that your life, your value, your sense of [00:01:00] self has been reduced to transactions. It's that feeling that no matter how much you work or how many things you acquire, there's always going to be something that is deeply missing. It's a hollowness the material success cannot fill. We see it all around us. We see it in the endless amount of ads. We see it in "The Grind." We see it in the obsession with hustle culture or pushing for the next paycheck. Or you can feel it in that emptiness that comes after yet another purchase that was supposed to make everything better but it didn't. This isn't just a feeling, it's a symptom of a system that prioritizes profit and productivity over human well being.

A lot of people have been sold the idea that fulfillment comes through what we can buy, or what we can achieve, but the more that we try to fill that void, the larger it becomes. Let's take Fight Club, for example. Fight Club serves as a pop culture mirror into this experience. The main character shares how his life is a series of consumer choices and career accomplishments, but none of it makes him happy.

FIGHT CLUB: [00:02:00] Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need. 

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: In his disillusionment, he becomes consumed by a desire to break free from that very system that traps him by descending into violence. This is Capitalistic Nihilism in its most raw form. It's the realization that the system was not designed to fulfill us, but rather to keep us endlessly chasing a carrot that's always out of reach.

A very brief history. Capitalistic Nihilism isn't new. So we're going back to the industrial revolution and this is when people were first reduced to mere instruments of labor on a mass scale. Happened very much before then but this is the first time on like a mass scale driven by machinery. We're starting to see more and more documentation of the connection between people and their work beginning to fray as workers were turned into cogs in the industrial machine.

And so no longer was work a source of identity or a source of pride. Instead, it became something that stripped people of their humanity. This alienation, as writers like Dostoevsky and [00:03:00] Nietzsche pointed out, started to breed a profound sense of purposelessness, a nihilism that questioned if any of it mattered if life was only reduced to production and consumption.

Later on in America, James Baldwin took this critique further, highlighting how capitalism didn't just dehumanize people through labor, but also through the racial structures It upheld. And so for Black Americans who had long been stripped of their humanity through chattel slavery, the system was particularly brutal. Not only did it deny them human rights, but it also excluded them economically. Baldwin's thoughts on capitalism and race were pretty clear and striking, but if you actually pay close attention, his ideas go beyond just race. His critique of the American Dream wasn't just about the ways in which Black Americans were shut out of the promise. It was also a warning to the entire nation, to anyone who would listen, about the fragility and emptiness of that very dream. 

JAMES BALDWIN: It's been a breakdown trail of the social contract in Western life. And people are grabbing for things, and holding on to what they think they can get, [00:04:00] and stepping all over their neighbors because they are hammock stricken.

HOST: What, comforting themselves with material things? Saying simple... 

JAMES BALDWIN: Yes. But when people do that, something is beginning to crack. People hoard all this because they don't have anything else, but they don't really believe in it. 

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: Baldwin understood something that the rest of America is only starting to wake up to now, and it's the reality that capitalism's, dehumanizing tendencies are not confined by race. Though race certainly sharpens the impact. When I think of his words, it comes as a great shock to discover that the flag to which you have pledged your allegiance has not pledged allegiance to you. Now, if you choose to listen, it's very easy to see that these words don't just speak to the Black experience, but to the disillusionment that so many are beginning to feel today.

The system was never built for human fulfillment, and now, more people, across all backgrounds, are starting to realize this. And the alienation and despair that Baldwin spoke of in the context of Black life under capitalism are now being felt more broadly as the system fails to [00:05:00] deliver on its promises to everyone.

We see this in the growing disillusionment with work as more people in American society question the value of grinding themselves down in jobs that offer little to no return, especially since the pandemic. Which I personally feel forced them to sit still for a lot longer than most people had for the very first time.

And we started to see that disillusionment again in the rise of quiet quitting, the rejection of hustle culture, where people are now starting to push back against the idea that their worth is directly tied to their productivity. It's fairly clear that Baldwin's critique of America was always bigger than race.

It was a critique of a society that defined success in terms of material wealth while leaving its citizens spiritually and emotionally bankrupt. And so as America wakes up to the reality that the pursuit of profits has hollowed out which really matters; connection, purpose, and fulfillment, we're confronting that same nihilism that James Baldwin warned us about.

The system wasn't built to serve us, but to exploit us. And the American Dream, though once it was very aspirational, it now feels like an illusion. What's [00:06:00] different today is that this disillusionment, once confined to the margins and marginalized groups, is spreading to the center.

Where Do We Go From Here? Featuring Kali Akuno - Millennials Are Killing Capitalism - Air Date 11-10-24

KALI AKUNO: I think we need to number one, be honest that, the type of preparation that was required did not happen. That doesn't mean that some folks here or there, that I know, or you may know, or others in the audience, haven't gotten trained, haven't been doing mutual aid, haven't been doing, trying to build some institutions, food production, some of the things that were mentioned in that last piece. Now, I know that had been going on, had been going on before that warning, just a lot of comrades with a particular political orientations have been doing that. But the piece I'm speaking to is that, the organizing within our communities were to have a political resonance. And for folks to understand the [00:07:00] broad necessity of like, well, why food sovereignty is necessary, why local food production is necessary, why people need to be engaged in it, why people need to convert their front yards, their backyards, things on top of your roof, if you live in New York or someplace like that. That didn't really happen. There was time and opportunity, but it didn't happen. And so one of our first tasks is to just, we need to break this in phases. Let me say that off the top as well. We need to break some of our response in phases. So as of now. We got two months, a legitimate two months before the actual official reigns get passed over to Donald Trump and to, to the Congress. They're already sitting in the Supreme Court. So you got two months to gear up, start making some connections, start building some kind of alliances. We got two months for the initial kind of preparation. [00:08:00] That needs to happen. And a couple of things I think, in addition to all of the points around self defense, mutual aid, low scale kind of autonomous production, all those things people need to be engaged in right now. Right? And start trying to map that out. But the most important and critical thing is starting to get ourselves prepared. For the repression that is going to come. And that will probably come in some ways. If we listen to what they said, and take them seriously, which I do, and which, I've been encouraging folks to take them seriously, about what their plans are and what, how they're going to execute them.

We need to gear up as much legally as we possibly can with some understanding that the law is not going to protect us. You're just kind of trying to use that as a shield ultimately [00:09:00] to, to like buy some time and to make a certain set of moves, that whatever democratic space exists, and that's going to change over time. Let me state that, let me back up a little bit. Cause I think there's a particular orientation that I think folks have to have, to kind of cast away some illusions. Because that's going to be important, to just be very clear about what the enemy is going to do, what they are prepared to do and, how some aspects of what they will do.

So I want folks number one to understand Trump has a mandate. He has a mandate. Now, he barely won more votes than he got the last time, but he won the majority, won the popular vote. He won the House and the Senate. [00:10:00] So they have a mandate from this society and how it plays the game of constructing social power, social and political power. They have a mandate and they are going to use it, understand that. Within that mandate, I would say this is point number two: Do not anticipate or plan on there being another kind of real election cycle, like folks need to jettison that. And I'm already hearing all the liberal pundits around what the Democrats need to do or what a third party needs to do or how we need to get it organized to win the next election or be better prepared. And you're making assumptions without listening to what these, some of these folks have actually said, who are now in a position to execute it, that [00:11:00] there will continue to be some semblance of the bourgeois order as we understand it, right? And we have experienced it for all of our lives to this point, those of us here in the United States anyway.

 Again, I hope I proved to a degree to be wrong, but basically, Trump and his team have said that they were going to shred the constitution. And many times in various different ways, the folks in the House have said pretty much the same thing. The Senate has been a little bit more tight lipped, the members there. And the Supreme Court has made it clear they're going to interpret the constitution in a way that is going to affect basically minority rule, white minority rule, for the future. So they may still make some reference to that as a body, [00:12:00] that gives them some legitimacy. But like the Bible has a million interpretations, they're going to interpret the way they want to interpret it, and they're going to execute power in a way that they see fit to maintain control and build the social order that they want. 

How To Fight Fascism In America - Why, America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 11-20-24

LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY, AMERICA?: Republicans claim there is leftist bias in all levels of government, the media, and higher education. While I think the leftist bias they've been screaming about definitely isn't a concerted effort by anyone to align the talking points or values espoused by think tanks or universities, but is instead just natural conclusions a majority of people come to when they're taught critical thinking skills, I say, okay. They already think there's a huge conspiracy promoting leftist bias. Why not lean into that and weaponize that bias to actually do something good for a change? Sure, they have billionaires, but we already have the major apparati, because the reality is that while there is a wide range of viewpoints that fall left of center, pretty much all of established experts, professional associations, think tanks, and universities, [00:13:00] as well as every other similar country in the world, fall to the left of the fascism Trump is promoting.

So it's time to coordinate. And that coordination, based on what conservatives have been doing for the last five decades, should have five prongs: universities, think tanks, the media, national lawmakers, and local government. And each prong has its own job. 

Universities must promote and publish academics and academic thought that espouses ideals in line with the goals of democracy and government's duty to provide for its citizens. This happens in every educational department, but especially in economics, because people really take that s-- seriously. Promote economists who espouse economic theories that go against the established neoliberal libertarian free market bulls-t. Because in the 40 years since Reaganomics, we can tell that s-t isn't working for 99 percent of us.

Promote economists whose theories espouse ideals that would benefit the 99%. Bring them in as speakers, publish their articles, hire them and give them tenure, allow them to mentor and inspire upcoming [00:14:00] generations. Promote law professors who teach creative lawyering and who espouse theories that promote our end goals of greater democracy and a government that provides for its people.

Bring them in as speakers. Publish their articles. Hire them and give them tenure. Allow them to mentor and inspire upcoming generations.

Think tanks, a category into which I think nonprofits generally can be included, provide jobs and funding for those academics and lend their work greater legitimacy by publishing their reports and pushing them as experts to the rest of society.

These think tanks should push their experts to the media, to talk at universities, to speak before Congress and local government bodies, and to not be afraid to act as lobbyists for their work. These experts should be in the ears of every lawmaker. They should be making public appearances, not just hiding in back rooms analyzing research. Think tanks should be pushing the work of the experts coming out of the universities that espouse the theories and ideals of democracy and government that provides for its people. There should be a constant revolving door [00:15:00] between Washington, D. C. and these think tanks and universities, so those with expertise are advising elected officials, writing policy and laws, becoming elected officials, and building a strong network of people within all of those spheres who believe in these ideals.

They should have a team of communications experts within these think tanks and nonprofits that can package this work in-house and push it to a wider audience. And those communications people should also work with the media. The media should be in constant contact with these think tanks and nonprofits, and with the experts working at the university level to rely on that expertise for their reporting.

They should report on the research coming out of these think tanks. They should write thought pieces about the findings. They should publish op-eds from these think tank and university experts. They should cite to them, wherever possible. 

More news media need to be willing to stand up to far right, hateful ideology; to refuse to give airtime to fascist, right wing bull-- coming out of these think tanks and universities being funded by [00:16:00] billionaires; to stop fearing the accusation of bias -- that terror of being called biased is what got us here in the first place. 

The right funded think tanks and experts to promote their twisted ideology and then screamed bias when the news media didn't legitimize their work with coverage. And so they were terrorized into giving equal coverage and therefore legitimacy to the billionaire-funded, weakly researched, often debunked free market ideology being spewed from these right wing sources. This means fact checking Trump at every turn. It means not legitimizing him or the people he surrounds himself with or right wing experts by presenting what they say as though it has any merit.

This also means supporting and building news organizations with an explicitly left-leaning bias. People on the right have no qualms about presenting Fox News as fair and balanced, despite the fact that, as we discussed on Monday, from the very beginning it was founded to be explicitly right wing and political.

People to the left of Fox News are terrified of appearing biased, and there absolutely does [00:17:00] need to be journalistic standards of fact checking and integrity, but expressly left-leaning media needs to be prioritized as well. This needs to happen in every form: written, social media, video, podcast, talk radio.

One can be a critical thinker and biased at the same time. And our feverish obsession with remaining unbiased, or only consuming that which we perceive is unbiased, means that we've lulled ourselves into the false sense that humans are capable of being unbiased. We are all adding our own personal spin to the stories we tell, whether we have an audience of millions, or an audience of one. Media literacy requires that we reckon with that, instead of trying to place our faith in the idea that there is one beacon of unbiased truth out there. That's not really how life works, and that's not the reality we're living in. Everything has a spin, and the right wing media landscape spin is winning. 

The federal government, lawmakers, and federal workers, and everyone in between needs to be infiltrated by people left of Trump. This means prosecutors who won't go [00:18:00] after immigrants or seek harsh penalties, Congress members who are products of the university and think tank system, willing to take risks to push the agenda through creative law writing, social media PR, and constant contact with the media, and who have strong connections with those universities and think tanks.

This means government lawyers seeking out those loopholes that Jon Stewart talked about and figuring out creative and risky ways to exploit those loopholes. Again, not to the detriment of democracy, but in support of it. Democrats and independents willing to speak truth to power, to get a little rowdy, and to play a little bit dirty.

And local government is where a lot of us can really f-- it up. This is where the experimental laws can be written and tested. Laws that use creative tactics to promote left leaning causes, like ending voter suppression, reversing gerrymandering, promoting non winner-takes-all voting systems, enshrining civil rights, providing universal basic income, graduated taxation, making housing affordable and available, et cetera, et cetera.

These laws can be ones that have never [00:19:00] been tried, but also established tactics, like in the case of increasing voter enfranchisement, universal registration, automatic mail ballots, and other initiatives that make voting as easy as possible. 

Your role in this depends on who you are and what your skills are. Check out my episode from a few weeks ago about how to get involved in local government for more information, but the key is to pinpoint your skills. For me, one of my skills is communication and also being absolutely f--ing annoying. I noticed a fence went up under an overpass near my house that displaced some unhoused folks that don't seem to have been provided any services or alternatives for shelter. So I emailed the Minnesota Department of Transportation, my city council person, and my state house representative, asking why my tax dollars were being wasted on a fence that didn't address the underlying issue of lack of affordable housing. The Department of Transportation email was forwarded with the message, "Can one of you deal with this?" Yeah, I'm going to be a person that my local government has to deal with. Make a fuss. Run for office. Learn the law and get involved with local government wherever you think you [00:20:00] can best f-k up through creative law writing. Take risks. Be willing to make people annoyed at you. Be a little mean. For fun.

The widening gender gap means a growing portion of the left is made up of women. Women who have been socialized to be as likable as possible. Do whatever you can to break yourself of that habit. Join a coven, bathe naked in a river, scream your lungs out at the moon, shave your head, I don't know, whatever speaks to you.

Now is not the time to be likable. Now is the time to be annoying as f-k for the good of your community and your country. White ladies, take your "I'd like to talk to the manager" energy and channel it towards annoying your elected officials to the breaking point so they pass meaningful progressive change that, again, moves the needle towards our shared goals of protecting democracy and providing for all our neighbors.

White men, take your mansplaining straight to your city council or your state representatives and use your place in society to advocate for progressive change. Be annoying. 

And your role doesn't have to just be annoying, concerned citizen. We need everyone, not just leftists and progressive, [00:21:00] but everyone who doesn't agree with the direction Trump is taking this country to look inward at the skills they possess and consider how those might best be used to the benefit of this five-pronged approach. What are you good at? And what do you enjoy doing? That's called your zone of genius, not just something you're good at, but something you thrive at. How can that be used to f-- Trump up? 

Like I said, I love communicating via these videos, providing information, and hopefully inspiration, and also being annoying as f-k. That lends itself well to making these videos and bugging my representatives. Maybe your one true love is getting into the streets and screaming; that's great. Maybe you've got a journalism degree. How can you use that? Maybe you're amazing at research. How can you spin that? Maybe you're great with computers. Someone hacked the Gates report and got their hands on some information that hasn't been leaked yet. I'm not advocating for breaking the law; I'm just saying that's an interesting use of a skill. Maybe you love talking to people and advocating for them. Perhaps it's time to consider running for local office or getting a law or public policy degree.

Maybe you're incredibly creative. There are so many things [00:22:00] creatives can do in these trying times. Look to other creatives throughout history to get inspiration for how to speak truth to power, or inspire others through your art. Or maybe lend your artistic skills to a cause you care deeply about. 

Maybe you're a master gardener and you can provide sustenance for your community.

Like, truly, what do you thrive at? And how can that be used in favor of one of these five prongs of this movement? Focus on that. Let me go crazy reading the news every day and distilling it down for you. I'm here for that. 

In fact, I just launched a Friday newsletter. It's called, Why America? The Newsletter, and you can sign up for it at the link in the description. Every Friday, I'll highlight a story I've been thinking about, as well as other headlines I'm watching this week. It's free, truly just offering it as an additional service in these trying times to help you avoid burnout and overwhelm. 

So, what can you do?

It doesn't have to be a major career change, it can be a small act of resistance every day, but coordinating those acts of resistance towards a common goal will make all of our work that much more effective. 

Timothy Snyder: Is Freedom Misunderstood? - The Agenda - Air Date 10-9-24

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: This notion of [00:23:00] positive versus negative freedom will be a new idea to many people watching or listening right now. So what's the diff? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. Negative freedom is the idea that it's me against the world. That the only problem is the world, there's a barrier out there. And the dramatic images, which of course come from history and from real experience, are the concentration camp, the foreign occupation, the barbed wire, the wall.

And of course, it's right that sometimes one has to resist. But at the same time, that's not enough for freedom. So even when the walls come down, there's still the question of who you are. In fact, the only reason why the wall is a bad thing is because it's holding you back. And so freedom from, which is where most people stop thinking about freedom, is really just a part of freedom to.

Getting the barriers out of the way is just the first step towards creating the conditions where you and I and everybody else can actually say, What do we really like? What do we really care about? What do we really love? What do we value? How do we want to change the world? That's freedom in the positive sense.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: [00:24:00] Why do you think it's important to make the distinction? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: First of all, I'm doing a very old fashioned thing here, I'm trying to get it right. I'm trying to get it right. I'm not saying what people say about freedom, I'm not talking about how the word is used, I'm trying to say what it in fact is. And I deeply believe that it is the ability to choose among the good things.

There are good things in the world. When we're in a condition or a state to choose among them, then we're free. But the political answer is, if you only believe that freedom is negative, you'll get persuaded that the government is only your opponent, you'll shrink the government, and the government will end up not being able to do precisely the things that it needs to do to help people grow up to be free.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: Defining freedom is a different ambition, you say, from defending freedom. How so? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Well, in my experience, the one ends up leading to the other. So I wrote a little pamphlet called On Tyranny, which I think we might have talked about a while ago-- 

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: We did indeed, yes. And it was more than a pamphlet. That was a book.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Okay, it was a pamphlet in the honorable sense of the word.

 -- where [00:25:00] I was trying to tell people what good practices would be to defend what we have. 

But people rightfully asked, well, what is it that we have? And I think the answer is that freedom isn't something in the end that you can only defend. You have to express it, create it, realize it, spread it, right? 

And so, the reason why I think we need a book like this, or the reason why we have to think about freedom positively, is we have to get out of the box of just defending things and think instead of opening up a political future.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: You've got it defined here in five different ways, five aspects of freedom, and I'll just list them here. Sure. Sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, solidarity. In your view, do all five need to be present for a society to truly be free? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So the way the book is set up -- this would take one step back if I could. In the beginning I say what I think freedom is, which is there are good things in the world, they conflict, you have to think about them over the course of a life as you make decisions, you create [00:26:00] character, freedom's positive that way. But it's also positive politically, because we have to work together to create the conditions where people could have that kind of life. 

The things that you mentioned: the sovereignty, unpredictability, the mobility, the factuality, the solidarity, those are the places where the ideas meet the politics, where real life meets the ideas, and we need as much of all of those things as possible, and also in order.

So by sovereignty, I mean the sovereignty of the person, because I think when we talk about freedom, we have to not assume that everybody is already an adult with property and has their life together, we have to think instead about a baby crying. We have to think, what are the things we have to do from the beginning so that that child has a chance to be sovereign, that child has a chance to have the ability to be free.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: You had a very funny way of describing that in the book, actually, where you say, babies are not born free, they're born hooked up to an umbilical cord and covered in their mother's blood. That's a pretty stark way of looking at it. But you're right. 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: But it's the only way of looking at it, Steve. It's the only way of looking at it. And our whole conversation about freedom abstracts away from that. We assume, [00:27:00] in the tradition of writing in English about freedom, we're assuming that there is essentially a Victorian age British gentleman with a plantation and perhaps some servants or slaves in the background. That's already built into the picture. We have to not do that. We have to be serious, which means thinking about the way life actually happens, from birth to death and all the adventures in between.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: As we, in Canada, look at your country, we assume you are obsessed with it, and we also assume that you think you have it better than anybody in the world. And it may come as a surprise to some of our viewers and listeners that you actually don't think that. So let's do another excerpt from the book here.

"By no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest peoples of the world," you write. "An American organization, Freedom House, measures freedom by the criteria Americans prefer: civil and political liberties. Year after year, about 50 countries -- 50! -- do better than us on these measures. Our northern neighbor, Canada, stands far above us. The countries where people tend to think of freedom [00:28:00] as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from." Okay, here we are again. Let's revisit this again. Like, freedom to and freedom from. Do we understand these concepts well enough? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: So, first of all, congratulations on getting one of the Canada references into the show.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: Just doing my job, sir.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: But the serious point is, if you only insist on freedom from, then you're going to get trapped. It's not just that you're not going to think about vacation, parental leave, free kindergarten, child care, in terms of freedom. Which you should do. It's also that in shrinking the government, you're gonna create space for oligarchs, because power abhors a vacuum. So other people will rush in. Social media platforms will rush in. They'll control the conversation about freedom. 

So two things go very wrong if you're only thinking about freedom negatively. If you think about it positively, then you have a chance for children to grow up in a situation where they can learn to think for themselves, control their emotions, have relationships, and have a better [00:29:00] chance at freedom.

And so the funny thing is that if you talk about freedom too much And in the wrong way, you end up boxing yourself in. You end up never thinking about it, which is, I'm afraid, the American condition too much of the time. And countries like Norway, or I'll say it, Canada, where folks talk less about freedom, may have laid the conditions better to actually live free lives.

Neoliberalism Borrowed From Lenin, Why Can’t We? - Unf*cking The Republic - Air Date 11-22-24

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: The bad guys today—people think it's these cabinet choices—but it's people like Russell Vought, Johnny McEntee, Paul Danz, Kevin Hassett, Rich Grenell, Eldridge Colby, Doug Wilson, Farris Wilkes. Nate Fisher, Mark Meckler, Bruce Sanborn, John Eastman, Barry Seid, Stephen Moore, James Pearson, Cleta Mitchell, Richard Graber.

Does anybody know who the fuck these people are? Because I'll tell you this much, they are the most influential people in America right now and nobody knows who the fuck they are. And I'm only just getting to know them. I know their [00:30:00] work. I know their work like the back of my fucking hand, but I don't know these people. Mostly men. Mostly White men. I don't know these White men. But we all need to know who they are. 

Now, there's information out there on them, but it's their work that lets you know what their angle is. They all sit on fancy boards and they all come from fancy companies and they all speak at conferences. Or they don't speak at conferences, but they fund the conferences and they're listed as a donor and they have their name on museum walls and hospital walls, and they belong to country clubs. But what they all have in common is they are part of this network of think tanks and foundations that funnel billions and billions and billions of dollars into tearing down our legal system, our education system, our culture, our media—everything. All of those so called pillars that we talked about; the human pillars of education, law, religion, [00:31:00] media, science, healthcare; the structural pillars like the economy, labor, foreign policy, energy, transportation; all feeding into the ultimate pillar that's holding this whole thing together and will begin to crumble more earnestly, and that is the environment.

But all of those pillars, they have a game plan. And these are the men, these are the names that we need to name. And I don't know how to get it out to the public in a way that holds them accountable for this. I know the names of their foundations: Protect Our Kids, Rockbridge, the venture capital company that funds all of the foundations and actually funds businesses, takes the profits from those businesses just to put them into other non profits that do nefarious things, building Christian networks of schools that are highly, highly profitable and really, really destructive.

Building out companies like Palantir that take our data and our information and weaponize that information back against us, but also participates in national security. The fact that all the satellites that we need to communicate [00:32:00] with, the fact that all the satellites that Ukraine needs to position their weapons against the Russian invasion, these are all owned by Elon Musk.

I mean, this guy was already so much a part of our government, it's amazing he didn't already have a fucking cabinet position. But he is the shadow government that we're talking about because we've given these contracts away. The fact that we do have private prison companies whose stocks exploded the minute Trump won, because we're going to create detention facilities to keep people in. Things like the Bradley foundation, which is responsible for Christian fundamentalism and taking over the curriculum in our public schools. And they're really smart because they go after individual specific states. You know where they go after? Swing states. That's where they go after because they knew if I might not get you this election, but I'm going to indoctrinate your kids and your kids are going to grow up and vote and they're going to vote the way that I want them to vote within just a couple of election cycles.

That's how fucking smart and dedicated they are to this. Things like the Noble Foundation, the John Olin Foundation, Donors Trust, the William [00:33:00] Simon Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Badger Institute. And then there's the think tanks: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles in History. We know Heritage, Mercatus, Cato, Conservative Partnership Institute, the Alma Center, ALEC, American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. They also have a focus on places like Wisconsin and Ohio. 

But the one thing that they all have in common is that they all have a conservative, right wing, Christian, fundamentalist value set. And their boards of directors are filled by those names that you don't know, that I'm just learning, that I mentioned before and their money comes from just a handful of billionaires and companies that were sold decades and generations ago that gained wealth over trusts over time. 

I was rereading Piketty this weekend talking about the capital return on [00:34:00] foundations and trusts over time is somewhere between eight and a half and ten percent over decades, as opposed to most people's returns, which is in the two to 5 percent and also periodically wiped out. The more money you have, the more money you can put at risk. And so the downturns for people that have foundations in generational wealth are actually a good thing because they can put X amount of dollars to risk, whereas most people can't put that kind of money to risk and their returns are 8 to 10 percent over time tracked. That's why they pulled away from the rest of us. So if you invest $10, you're going to get 2 percent back on that over time. And in your best case scenario, assuming you haven't been wiped out by student debt or fucking healthcare debt, the foundations and the people that really accumulated billions of billions of dollars are starting with a billion dollars and they're making 8 to 10 percent over time.

So what do you think happens to that money? It flows back into the system, into funding places like this that wind up influencing policies that we now live with. [00:35:00] Trump is not the end result of this thing. He's the symptom that we get from pure corrupting of the system. And these are the names, the institutions, and the people behind it.

How do we tell this fucking story? Because they have places like American Spectator, or the Daily Wire, the City Journal, all of talk radio with people like Sinclair Broadcasting, Christian film production companies, Keiton Key Media is one of them. They just produce radical right wing Christian videos. Kirk Cameron's fucking production company. PragerU. Some of these are being now pulled into the actual curriculum of private Christian schools in certain areas, and when they get rid of the Department of Education, which they're going to try and do, they're going to bring these down into the state level curriculum and our kids are literally going to be learning creationism. They're going to be learning about Jesus Christ in the fucking classroom. They're not going to allow anything taught about diversity, about Islam, about Judaism, about [00:36:00] countercultures, anything. They're going to be taught about anything. They're not even going to learn American history. They're just going to learn the regular history. 

One of these papers that I read from Pastor Doug Wilson was about how they infused all of their schools in Ohio with a doctrine that said the best thing that happened to Black people in this country was slavery because it was in partnership with White people and it's the best that they ever lived. If you heard that idea circulating, through the last election cycle, that's where it fucking came from and they started that shit in the 70s. That's how deeply Indoctrinated it is and you are not conspiratorial to understand that it all started with a handful of people that created a Leninist vanguard, attached themselves to money, saying that they can set that capital free so they can eventually take over the world and destroy the government.

That was their aim. So, what do we do? How do we counter that? We counter it through [00:37:00] knowledge. We counter that through language, by naming names, but by also getting really organized. And this is my big lesson, that I want everybody to really understand and to ingest: is that, similar to them, yes, it's going to take a long time, but similar to the way that they looked at it, these revolutionary insights, so long as we have the right people attaching themselves to the right causes can be pulled off even if it's the smallest group possible. You can be part of that vanguard by listening, by learning, by studying. And over this next several year period, by being an upstander, and protecting the people that the system is going to come after. Because, yes, they're trying to distract you, but they're going to distract you by destroying lives in the process. 

So, long story fucking short, what I'm doing right now—and I don't know what [00:38:00] form our episodes are going to take over the next few months as a result of that —is I'm going back to the beginning. There's so many things that I learned along the way that I've forgotten. But it's all right there. And I want to tell this story more cogently, more accessibly, more straightforward, by showing you how they did it. Because we've been unraveling the mystery. I've been learning as we've been going. Together. Now we kind of know. 

So, Kurt Anderson's Evil Geniuses. It's a great book. Dark Money by Jane Mayer. Democracy in Chains by Nancy McClain. They've all got a different story. Piece of the puzzle, but those pieces are really important. And then there's the work that's been done by groups like ProPublica or a number of other institutes out there that track the partisan nature of these organizations and their funding sources.

We kind of know who these people are and there's profiles on all of them. And you can look up their [00:39:00] 990s in GuideStar, and you could put all the money together. You can follow the money. You can follow the sources. You can follow the ideology. I just feel like the story needs to be told in a way that we can retell it to the people that need this information to take over the system.

The Tragic Optimist's Guide to Surviving Capitalistic Nihilism - Dasia Sade Part 2 - Air Date 11-29-24

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: In the face of this systemic disillusionment, I offer you an alternative philosophical framework as a possible antidote to the chaos: tragic optimism.

The tragic optimist's perspective, finding meaning in pain, joy, and impermanence. Life is suffering. Hear me out. Hear me out. Hear me out. Hear me out. Life is suffering. But life isn't only suffering. In the chaos of life where suffering is inevitable, and the world often feels indifferent to our struggles, Tragic optimism offers a powerful way to face the darkness without losing hope.

This philosophy, rooted in the works of thinkers like Viktor Frankl, teaches us that meaning can be found in even the [00:40:00] most difficult circumstances. Yet, to fully grasp tragic optimism, we must also look back to James Baldwin, who understood the deep relationship between pain and transformation. Baldwin believed that our suffering, far from being something to avoid, was something to be used.

Something that could be used to illuminate truths, to fuel growth, and to ultimately find liberation. It was Baldwin who told us, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that's not what's important. What's important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. So with that being said, let us explore the pillars of tragic optimism while also getting clear on the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

We'll also touch on the importance of embracing impermanence. Embracing pain is a teacher. [00:41:00] 

Tragic optimism: 

Tragic optimism is a philosophy, unlike toxic positivity, okay? It doesn't ask us to push away our pain or ignore it. Instead, it encourages us to acknowledge suffering as an integral part of life while still holding space for hope and growth.

This idea was popularized by Viktor Frankl, who after surviving the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, argued that even in the darkest of times, we have the power to find meaning in our suffering. He believed that while we cannot control our circumstances, we can control our response to them. James Baldwin wrote extensively about how pain can be a source of understanding and personal power.

In his essay, The Fire Next Time, he says, "you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world". But then you read, this shows us that pain is not something to be avoided or ignored but embraced and understood. It's what connects us to being human. And he believed that through acknowledging the pain, not running and using our pain, we can [00:42:00] transcend it.

He continued on, "you must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain. And insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it. And then hopefully it works the other way around too. Insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you suffer less".

It's probably really easy to tell by now, but Frankl and Baldwin have long been two of my favorite proponents of the tragic optimism perspective. And I've kind of weaved that throughout my own life because they highlight a critical component of tragic optimism, and it's that suffering is inevitable, but it can be meaningful if we choose to engage with it constructively. And probably what I want most people to take away from this video is that nihilism and cynicism in the face of suffering or tragedy is like the downhill flow of water. It's the easiest, most natural, the next in line thing to do. And no one would blame you, if that's [00:43:00] what you chose to do when it comes to navigating your very short time here on this rock, no one would blame you.

But I think the most important aspect to understand is the reality that it is a choice, nonetheless. You still choose that. And should you find yourself making that choice? My very next question would be how is that working out for you? Balancing realism and hope and the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

So one of the key pillars of tragic optimism is knowing the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering. Necessary suffering is suffering that is going to be required for growth and unnecessary suffering is something that is self inflicted. In Baldwin's work he often speaks of the necessity of facing uncomfortable truths, particularly about race, identity, power, status, health, as a means to personal and societal transformation. There are things in our lives that are inescapable, meaning as a human being on this planet you will deal with them. No one gets out of this. [00:44:00] There is no cheat code or anything like that. You will go through it. So these are things like grieving, the loss of a loved one, taking care of an aging parent, the emotional pain of ending a relationship, personal failure, sickness, death. These are components of necessary suffering. He argued that the only way to heal from the wounds was to confront them head on, no matter how painful the process might be.

This is necessary suffering, the kind of suffering that leads to growth and liberation. However, on the other hand, unnecessary suffering occurs when we resist reality or we refuse to accept life's inherent uncertainties. Missing out on a fun time to study for your bar exam. Is necessary suffering. Giving yourself an anxiety attack leading up to the bar exam because you chose not to study for said exam would be unnecessary suffering. A cheat code to figure is this necessary or unnecessary suffering is if you're suffering and you were to stop doing something like going back to an abusive ex or [00:45:00] eating after 11 p. m. and the suffering that you're experiencing eventually stops, you're probably inviting unnecessary suffering into your life. Tragic optimism teaches us that while suffering is inevitable, not all suffering is productive. And the only way to navigate life is knowing the difference so that when you are inevitably confronted with necessary suffering, you can face it forthrightly instead of being distracted or having additional stress piled on by unnecessary suffering, too.

I went to a 10 day silent retreat and you'd be surprised at what you can hear in the silence, but something that I learned that has shifted my perspective a lot is how we as humans tend to exist in two states, craving or aversion. We're either craving an outcome or craving something we don't have, or we're avoiding something.

We're avoiding Doing something which places is too far outside of ourself by craving something we're probably living in the past craving a time [00:46:00] that we cannot have or craving something in the future or we're avoiding existing in the present, something that we need to address or do. And when we're bouncing in between these two states, we are in our own personal hell.

For example, the pain of trying to maintain an illusion, whether it's the illusion of control, the illusion of something lasting forever, or the illusion of a life free from any hardship whatsoever, it just leads to more suffering. And Baldwin understood this deeply, noting that much of the pain in the world comes from denying the truths that are too painful to face.

JAMES BALDWIN: Otherwise, of course you're gonna despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you gotta remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that [00:47:00] monster. You could be that cop.

And you're deciding yourself not to be. 

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: Running from reality doesn't shield us from suffering. It just prolongs it. In contrast, facing suffering directly allows us to discern what is within our control and what isn't. What suffering is necessary for growth and what suffering we can let go of. That while we cannot escape hardship, we can escape the suffering that comes from our refusal to accept reality.

The path of tragic optimism asks us to engage with necessary suffering, to allow it to shape and refine us, and to let go of unnecessary pain that we're, that we create by clinging to illusions of permanence or control or delusions of grandeur or how we feel things should be. Impermanence and the importance of not running.

Another key aspect of tragic optimism is the understanding of impermanence. The idea that nothing lasts forever. For Baldwin and Frankl alike, the [00:48:00] knowledge of life's impermanence was not something to fear, but something to embrace. It's through this lens that we can better navigate both suffering and happiness, knowing that neither of them will last forever.

Running from this reality keeps us trapped in that space of craving and aversion. Facing it allows us to grow and move forward. This understanding of impermanence frees us from the fear of loss by allowing us to experience life fully without clinging to any moment. Suffering, like joy, is impermanent.

Nothing lasts forever.

Note from the Editor

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Dasia Sade starting and ending the segment with her analysis of tragic optimism. Millennials are Killing Capitalism discussed the need to get prepared for the coming years. Leeja Miller on Why, America? laid out a plan to coordinate progressive action for change. The Agenda spoke with Timothy Snyder about the concepts of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to'. And Unf*cking the Republic described the right wing [00:49:00] change-makers working to make the world worse for the rest of us. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring their production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. And, you know, now I'm a little late mentioning this as we approach the middle of December, but we have once again launched our winter sale on memberships, which I hear make a great gift. Discounts and gifting are available both on our site and now on Patreon as well. So, whichever you think is a better fit for either yourself or your giftee, act accordingly. There are, of course, all of the relevant links in the show notes, or just go to bestoftheleft.com/support. 

Today's episode and, you know, frankly, the subtext of most episodes these days is that the way forward is together. It's our belief that sticking together and staying engaged is actually the best way to [00:50:00] fend off the gloom of an impending second Trump administration. But it also happens to be our livelihood at stake. You've probably heard that many are taking this opportunity to check out of politics entirely. Hopefully, it's just temporary. But for independent shows like ours, that can be a real problem. And that just makes the support of every member and listener all that much more important. 

If you're still listening, that means that you're still in the fight with us and we need your support because our plan is to be here for as long as we can, but we have zero big money backers helping make this show happen. It all depends on people actually listening and supporting the show. 

So again, head to bestoftheleft.com/support or follow the links in the show notes to grab your own membership currently on a 20% discount or snap up some gift memberships for this wintery gift giving season.

As always if paid membership isn't in the [00:51:00] cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

SECTION A - ORGANZING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on just two topics today. Next up, Section A: Organizing, followed by Section B: Coping.

Organizing in Rural America (w/ Luke Mayville) - Know Your Enemy - Air Date 11-27-24

MATTHEW SITMAN: You were very involved with Medicaid expansion there, getting it on the ballot as an initiative. Maybe you could tell us about what that campaign was and kind of how you went about organizing that effort, because the results were different in Idaho than a lot of other places that also expanded Medicaid, you did very well, even in the rural counties, sometimes, you know, overperforming places that went against Hillary Clinton by 40 points or something, right? So could you tell us about the Medicaid expansion campaign and how you went about organizing that effort? 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Well, a few old friends of mine, Emily and Garrett Strzodzic, married A couple, we got together and started this organization, Reclaim Idaho. And our first big [00:52:00] project was the Medicaid expansion. And an important part of the story is, you know, we were people who followed politics closely and in my case, you know, I came with this background in political science and political theory, but we were very much amateurs in politics. I had some amount of experience mainly just doing volunteer work, but beyond that, no professional political work whatsoever. And that meant early on that we had no credible case to make to any donors or anything like that, that we were going to be able to actually get a serious statewide campaign off the ground. And that put us in a really hard position where without any money to really get something going and without being able to just hire a lot of people, especially when you have to, to get something on the ballot, you have to put together a massive signature drive to get the signatures to put it on the ballot. So how to do that with [00:53:00] no money. So what we turned to is the little bit we knew about organizing and theories of grassroots organizing and what we were really motivated by early on was this idea of distributed organizing, where you could go around and find people in different local communities all across the geography. So in this case, all across the state of Idaho, and you could build local teams of volunteers who would work together in support of a common cause. And it's this old idea. And this is something that I wrote about for Commonweal a few years ago, this idea that there are people scattered all over the place, all over the country and in any given community, who are out there who really want to get engaged in politics and they want to do something big and even monumental. They want to really like work hard on something. They don't just want to be asked to send an email or chip in $10. They actually want to be part of some [00:54:00] big positive change. And the challenge of organizing is you've got to get out there and find those people.

And then you have to make the right type of ask of them and set in front of them, the right type of strategy. And a big breakthrough for us was we came up with this idea of touring around the state in an old green camper. It was a 1978 Dodge Ranger RV and we spray painted it bright green and we put the slogan Medicaid for Idaho across the side of it.

And we toured around and some organizers have called this barn storming as a kind of tactic. You show up in a town, you try to get as many people to at least show up to your event, at least get their foot in the door, or in our case, you know, maybe it was just meeting in parking lot or a park right around our RV and just show up.

And then by the time they leave, you want them to be committed at some level, to continuing to be involved in the effort. So we did that and we were able to build [00:55:00] these local teams around the state. That ultimately powered a signature drive that enabled us to get it on the ballot. 

And then once we had an extraordinary amount of momentum, we were able to build a whole coalition of organizations that wouldn't have taken us seriously. And in many cases didn't take us seriously at all when we started, but by the end of it, we had something closer to an actual professional coalition campaign combined with this unique grassroots campaign. And I do credit that combination with how we were able to drive up the vote share so much, especially in all of these far flung small towns and rural areas in the state.

MATTHEW SITMAN: And Luke, before we go any further, what's the timeline here? 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Well, that's an incredibly important question because it was 2017, so it was in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. So we're very much part of that groundswell, that national groundswell, people coming out and wanting to do something. And, you know, like some people have called it huddling, people just [00:56:00] coming together in living rooms, trying to figure out what they're going to do after the 2016 election and feels a little bit different at the moment. I'm not sure what's going to happen this time around 

SAM ADLER-BELL: Fewer huddles. 

LUKE MAYVILLE: But back then it was certainly happening in a major way. And I think a really successful tactic that we had is that we would bring people together in these organizing meetings and something I used to do is, you know, if you had a circle of people, I would go around, ask them to introduce themselves and say something about what motivated them to show up here today. And after the first, like one or two of those, I realize that if you're not careful, like half the people or more, we'll just launch into talking about how much they hate Trump.

So what I started doing is saying, you know, "introduce yourself, say something about what motivates you to be here today and please, if you can, if you were going to mention the president don't, and it's okay. It's okay if that is the immediate thing that [00:57:00] motivated you. But try to dig deeper and actually ask yourself, 'what is it about my values at some level, or my commitments, my deeper commitments that Trump offends?' And just talk about those things, take the president and the parties, the political parties out of it, make it about those deeper values that you have that are being offended in this moment and talk about that." And that was, I think, a really important shift because that actually gave us something really constructive to then build on.

SAM ADLER-BELL: I want to talk more about the texture of that organizing, to give listeners a feel for what it was like to do it, both the signature gathering and then the campaign. But before we do, I feel like we may have jumped the gun a little bit. For listeners who may not remember the history of Medicaid expansion. Obamacare passed and the biggest part of it in the most important part of it, the part that really actually helped the most people [00:58:00] was the Medicaid expansion.

It just raised the threshold to what is it double the poverty line, and that meant that. Many, many, many, many, many, many more people who fell in a crack, who didn't have health insurance could get it through Medicaid. Conservatives didn't like that. And what was it, a court that decided that? 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Yeah. So the big showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012, the Court was considering whether to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act. And the big headline was, you know, John Roberts upholds the ACA, right? That was the big headline. But tucked within that story was a real tragedy, which is the Court said, "well, the Medicaid expansion part is optional for states."

So, the federal government can't simply expand Medicaid programs in all 50 states. They have to leave it up to the local politicians to determine. And when they did that, it broke along partisan lines, where states run by Republicans refused to accept this massive expansion of healthcare in their own states.

SAM ADLER-BELL: Federal money that [00:59:00] was just sitting there. And that's just, that's a really important setup for this story because the places where these kinds of initiatives were taking place on ballots were in red states because they were the states where governors or state legislators decided, no, we don't want to help the poor people here.

And that's why people like you were in this position of having to organize on this terrain that people thought of as hostile to this kind of, you know, expansion of the welfare state, even though, of course, many red states have a very, very high number of people who are not on health insurance and very, very high number of people who are poor.

That's the situation. I just wanted to say that that is the situation. So many places ended up doing it this way, right? By getting it on the ballot and then letting people vote. But they were in red states where this took place. 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Yes, and there were some, as the years went on after that US Supreme Court decision, there were a few exceptions where maybe relatively moderate Republican governors would come forward and say, "okay, [01:00:00] the game's up. Like we've got to accept this money." Like John Kasich in Ohio, for example, came forward and said, we can't afford to just turn down hundreds of millions, or in the case of Ohio, probably billions of federal dollars every year.

And so they accepted it, but they were the exception. And most states run by Republicans refused to accept it. 

MATTHEW SITMAN: And thus getting on the ballot was a kind of end around these intransigent Republican governors.

The Quest for the Offline Left with Cecilia Guerrero: Organizing the South - Fucking Cancelled - Air Date 11-3-24

I'm very curious about what it's like trying to organize in the South, right? Cause it's got this like reputation as being very conservative and reactionary and so on. I imagine in some ways that would make it very difficult in certain other ways.

I can see it being. Almost helpful because the liberal establishment has had less of a foothold to like fuck everything up for you. But yeah, tell me about being a socialist in the South. Uh, yeah, I mean, it is, it is definitely kind of. A shit show. I I was organizing in Massachusetts and although the laws of the area where I I [01:01:00] was, were technically very progressive, it was, you know, I was also living in an area where not a lot of people that you will call, like actually working class were able to live in just like a very more academic more, you know, middle class area, right? And so I first came to the south in 2019 after the largest ice rates in U. S. history. So, during the Trump presidency three poultry plants were raided by ice about 800 people were detained and separated from their families. I was part of the team that was being part of the ground efforts to for the community organizing the community into a response into committees, trying to get the information on the ground of what had happened.

And I just, Realize that there was a lot to do here and that, if I wanted to call myself like a serious organizer, I have to be here instead of [01:02:00] fighting for very symbolic policies and symbolic legislations in an area with where, like, actually working class people could not really afford to live in.

And so I, I came here it's been almost five years. It's been a shit show. I mean, I am originally from Mexico, so like I am familiar with you know. It's definitely more close to home than being in Massachusetts, but like you said, one of the great things is that, it's either socialist or fascist here.

Liberals have zero chance of winning, like, no, no, for real, like, it's socialism or barbarism. And there's definitely like the NGO liberals and Democrats who kind of hate your guts and definitely do try to undermine the efforts. But in general, there's just a lot of working class people. And even when you talk to a lot of Republicans, even like Trump supporters they might get maybe 50 [01:03:00] percent of the things right.

Or 60 percent of the things right, right? Like there is a real frustration with the establishment. They'll bring up like, the economic issues, which, you know, a lot of Democrats really shy away from they'll say like, well, the politicians are just there to listen to the corporations.

And so like, you have actually a lot of things to work with and actually spend some time in redirecting that energy. If folks actually wanted to talk to everyday people, right. Which is a, it's a big problem right now in the lab. Yeah, absolutely. And did you have connections to Nashville before you moved there or did you move there literally just for like political reasons?

Uh, I moved here for political reasons. Primarily I'm honestly I met some organizers from Tennessee while I was in Mississippi that were also organizing after the ice raids of 2019. Heard there was a worker center hiring. I heard there were some unions hiring. So I [01:04:00] applied to different jobs and I ultimately picked the one that I felt most aligned with.

Um, , and that, Became a little bit of a nightmare, but then I also eventually I learned a lot and now I am here. Amazing. Well, we'll talk a bit later about some of the lessons that you may have learned along the way. I'm interested in the organization the, I guess you helped to start called, um, a Luta which I guess is a mix of Spanish and Portuguese.

And it means the struggle continues. Is that right? tell me about this organization. Cause it's described as like an incubator of other organizations which I. I really love that idea. And we've had people on the show before from an organization called C's here in Montreal, that is also an incubator, less of a sort of like radical less trying to incubate radical organizations and more trying to incubate workers cooperatives.

But it's a similar kind of strategy where you have like one kind of like [01:05:00] central organization that does its best to help create other ones that are useful. So anyways, tell me about, and what you guys do and why you started it. Yeah. So the way that we describe it is, you know, I look, I see it is a, an incubator of mass based projects led by workers and youth, aiming to serve like the working class here in our region. Why an incubator for many reasons, right? So one, we are actually a nonprofit. So we got our nonprofit license early, like at the beginning of the year. And as we know, nonprofits are not designed to be democratic organizations, revolutionary organizations and they're also not designed to be organizations where you can actually build Like worker power.

You know, I know that there might be some organizations that are doing good work and that do have a base of workers But in reality if you look at the whole like non profit sector, I mean, there's just a lot of legal [01:06:00] limitations with that Yeah For example during the Trump presidency, right, like a lot of worker centers that were actually doing real work were accused of being unions.

And we're because they were engaging direct worker organizing. So when you see a lot of worker centers they're organizing is kind of lame. And it's not just lame because Often is because it might be lame, but also it is lame because there's actually real limitations on the kind of organizing that one can do.

And, on top of the fact that the culture in the left and so much, but so much of what we know as the culture in the left. As cancel culture as postmodernism, it comes from the non profitization of of social movements, right? Like around the 80s and 90s capturing the the energy from the 60s and 70s which already have some issues right to begin with and so what we're trying to do is to use this structure as a way of you know [01:07:00] Nonprofits can still get funding.

It's really difficult for you know, I am I am not I do not come from either like a very even a middle class background, right? So there's not a lot of ways that you can really raise funds to actually have some kind of organizing being done. But also we're trying to break from the traditional like nonprofit structure in which you have workers come in.

The campaigns are basically decided by the staff are micromanaged by the staff. And so we try to see, hey, what if we identify leaders within working class sectors and that are actually committed and ready, like they're fed up, they're ready for a change. And we just take some time, take it slow, and actually train them to lead their own organizations, right?

Which actually requires us to break from the cycle of non profits of like, let's rush [01:08:00] into applying for grants, let's rush into campaigns because we need some wins right off the bat to get some grants. You know, let's do all these things and then just tokenize a few workers use some like identitarian stuff and, you put them in photo in like in photo ops and you get your money, right.

And keep reproducing the same, the same culture. You know, why don't we take it slow? We are. We don't have funds for a while. And start with a group of very committed people train workers really well to run their own organizations and then let them take full ownership of these organizations, and we've seen that he has worked.

So, like, right now we have we have a youth organization, the Southern Youth Solidarity Network, which is a group of young people and young students That have aligned their movement alongside the working class, right? Realizing like, hey, maybe student power is not really a progressive [01:09:00] demand.

Because students are not a social class. So let's align ourselves behind the working class. We also have Poder Popular or Nashville People Power, which is an immigrant worker organization that organizes tenant unions and worker committees, primarily in construction, the construction industry.

And we have the Tennessee drivers union, which is it's the largest Uber and the union in the South.

SECTION B - COPING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now Section B: Coping.

Let This Moment Radicalize You - The Bitchuation Room (with Francesca Fiorentini) - Air Date 11-30-24

I would look at what's happening in the United States as part of this global disease that's happening, that's infecting worldwide. And that's called the student pop marks, but also, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I don't, I wouldn't waste my, I wouldn't encourage people to waste their time looking at, you know, posters and things like this right now, at this point, we really have to look at the, crisis of legitimacy of the liberal democratic.

The liberal progressive project, which I think has been defunct and been a [01:10:00] zombie is like anything in those shows that you really like, you know, the walking dead and stuff. I mean, they've been walking dead for a while. Why do we keep watching and supporting them? Well, you just said the crisis of legitimacy is something that, I mean, we just spoke to in the previous segment around, you know, Even these like institutions of justice being unable to hold account, hold their own accountable almost not by flaw, but by design.

I mean, there are so many norms that are just norms. They are not laws. And even when they are laws, you cannot even enforce them. Um, and as we said, you know, I mean, not that Brazil is, uh, incredible on all fronts, but did bar successfully Bolsonaro from running for reelection for eight years.

And so that crisis of legitimacy is being felt so much that I've been saying, you know, we should really let this moment radicalize us, but I want to ask you like how do we deal with these feelings of like numbness and anger and [01:11:00] despair. Like, how do we navigate that? While we're also bracing for very concrete attacks on us, our communities, our speech, whatever it is.

Well, if I had the answer to that, I'd be a richer man, be a therapist, university professor's salary. But that said, what I'm doing personally and what I encourage my students and people to do is Firstly and foremost, you have to embrace reality. We're here because of the abandonment of reality by by the society at large.

I mean, fascism, contrary to MSNBC, is a bipartisan project at this point in history. If you look at, say, for example, the genocide in Palestine, you've been watching in real time the slaughter of a people. That's unprecedented. In history, genocide isn't, but the watching it in real time is, and the [01:12:00] cultural effects of having a society conditioned to embrace and accept genocide is, I mean, there has presidents in the industrial age and the rise of, film in Germany and stuff, but nothing like the real time streaming of genocide and the cultural, moral, psychic effects are deep.

So we have to kind of look at reality, but like Perseus, you know, we have this Medusa like figure. I don't want to, it's a misogynistic trope and myth, but it's useful in terms of having a mirror that Perseus had to be able to slew the Medusa. You can't look at reality right now, the way it's being given to you and fed to you by the corporate media at this point.

The corporate media has proven itself completely complicit, not just with genocide, but with the mass dumbing down of the society with the acceptance [01:13:00] of fascistic immigration policies like those. Fostered by Obama, continued by Trump, continued by Biden, and now going to be expanded by Trump. So it's a continuum of bipartisan enabling of the fascist project that the Saudis, that banking interests, that Pfizer, that all these corporate interests are more than willing.

to accept as long as their bottom line is met. Trump means the elites are willing to accept fascism. They will tell you that. But we need to psychically and intellectually frame this because I mean, I'll just tell a story like from the book where I was dealing with Central American Children who were caged and separated by Obama.

One kid I remember in particular had seen his uncle's brains. because he got shot a child of six years old. So I was working with the psychologist and asking them, Hey, how do you deal with a [01:14:00] child that's a bit exposed to this? And so the psychologist told me something I think is relevant for all of us right now.

And that's that, um, you always have to remember that there's an indestructible part of you. 

I know this from having experienced war and having dealt with children and mothers and families who have seen what I can only call apocalyptic reality that leaves anything we're dealing with right now in McDonald's because it's, it's, so when you're dealing with the psychologist in treating that Children and other people like them told me that what they do is they help them tell stories about themselves that are connected to that indestructible side of themselves.

That's the place, I think, to begin and end with. If you're going to really, really try to continue practicing what I call sustainable struggle, we have to think not just about a sustainable environment, but a sustainable [01:15:00] internal environment. Sustainable struggle that's connected then to other people. In a sustainable struggle for us, a more sustainable planet.

We we haven't been trained or conditioned to understand what we're dealing with. And I think I hate to diss, um, these apocalyptic children, but they're really, I think, doing more damage than good at this point because they decided imagination to trying to find solutions to real, real serious shit.

What are our kids gonna face? What do I tell them? They normalize it. They normal. They're like, okay, yeah. So, um, democracies have fallen. Countries have collapsed. There's already been like a World War three and four, and we're in this dystopian and , sort of entertainment wise it conditions you to be like, we're all just sitting here waiting for the collapse as if we don't have a role to play, as if we are not actors, as if we don't have agency. And so there is [01:16:00] this fatalism and cynicism that I think leads to electing strong men obviously. Only in name but strongmen like Donald Trump or like in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele or, these cynical turns in Argentina voting for you know, Javier Mele, who is a model right now for the Trump administration that I wanted to ask you about also, because, um, Javier Mele is destroying the social welfare state of Argentina.

The only thing that kept it from being plunged into like deep, deep, many people in the middle class, plunging them into poverty, getting rid of institutions like the funding for public universities, which truly was made the country prestigious in Latin America, because many people from all over especially South America would go to Buenos Aires and see it.

study at the Uber. And it also was a leg out of, you know, not out of but a solid middle class kind of existence. And he's destroying that. And now you [01:17:00] have, you know, we're going to talk about Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who are like salivating to do the exact same to this country. So, anyway, I'm just interjecting there, but there's also resistance that we can learn.

Strategies of resistance from Latin America that we can also learn. Absolutely. I'm glad you're bringing that up because, again, you're not going to get that on Rachel Maddow, who, you know, wrote a book, managed to, you know, just, the deep intellectual work to write a book about fascism that barely touches upon capitalism, one of the pillars of which fascism is the maximum expression.

This is the kind of like enabling function that the liberal progressive project plays for fascism. It is a contrary to it. It is an enabler and the degree to which we are clear about that and abandon the project for something yet to be created, except in the mind and in the heart [01:18:00] is the degree to which we will start kind of being able to think outside of the boxes of neoliberal capitalism and techno network fascism.

So, I mean, when you mentioned me, I was just in Argentina in the summer. and South America. And yes, I saw the university. I visited universities. I talked with journalists. I everywhere I would go, there would be people who are being displaced by by the budget cuts and stuff. But everywhere I went, there were also protests.

They were also organizing. They were also chanting, singing, being together in struggle. The Americas Indigenous people in the Americas, indigenous people around the world have had to deal with, I would say, apocalypse for a very long time. But to some of us, this reality is now coming home to roots because what [01:19:00] they're doing in Argentina, they're now going to do and are doing.

to the state of the United States. They're dismantling. Project 2025 is just an accelerated version of what Biden, Obama, Clinton, Bush, Reagan were doing with the dismantling of the welfare state. We forget that to our detriment.

How To Spot Authoritarianism — and Choose Democracy | Ian Bassin - TED - Air Date 6-18-24

IAN BASSIN: We still have the time and the power to prevent that playbook from succeeding. How? By exercising the one thing that democracies guarantee that autocracies take away: the power to choose. Because underneath it all, democracy lives or dies based on choices, right?

In big moments like elections, sure. But also the countless choices that citizens make every day as participants in a democracy. That's what I learned from those binders, right? Choices made in the spotlight, choices made when no one is looking. They add up, and [01:20:00] they either fortify democracy, or they chip it away.

So, how we doing on this front? Well, we have made some good choices that are cause for hope and some not so good ones that are reasons for real concern. And so I want to give an example of a democracy-saving choice, an example of a democracy-destroying choice, and we'll end on choices we all can make to be the difference.

So first, the democracy-saving choice. Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shay Moss stepped up to serve as election workers during a pandemic to help their fellow citizens in the state of Georgia vote in 2020. And they did their jobs with honor and integrity, never imagining what was going to happen next.

An autocrat and his allies, desperate to hold onto power, falsely accused them of stealing the election from him. Their lives were turned upside down. They became the subjects of vile, [01:21:00] unrelenting, unthinkable intimidation and harassment. They received racist death threats. Ruby was forced to flee her home on the advice of the FBI for her own safety.

After what happened to them, it would have been entirely understandable if they had decided to slink off into their private, quiet lives. And had they chosen to do that we would have moved that much further away from protecting democracy. But they made a different choice. They chose to stand up.

Represented by our organization, they brought multiple lawsuits against the people and organizations who defamed them, depriving them of their reputations and their safety. They testified before Congress about how a former president and his allies, rather than protecting them as public servants and citizens, targeted them, putting their lives in danger. And because they [01:22:00] chose to invoke our laws and our courts and our institutions in democracy's defense, they are establishing a deterrent against anyone doing to others what has been done to them. 

But not everyone is making such good choices. And most worryingly, people with far more institutional power than Ruby and Shay are making choices that are as bad for democracy as Ruby's and Shay's were good. So, a brief lesson from history: between World War I and World War II, far right authoritarian parties were rising across Europe. In Belgium and Finland, the mainstream center right parties saw those on the right flank for what they were, threats to the very foundations of their democratic systems. And so they did the hard thing. They chose to unite with their traditional opponents on the left to block the autocrats from power. 

In Italy and Germany, the mainstream center right parties made a different choice. They calculated that they could ride the energy [01:23:00] of those on their far right to power and then once there, sideline the extremist leaders. We know how tragically that turned out.

Well, in recent years too many on America's center right have made a similar calculation that they too can ride the energy on the extremist right to power and then sideline the extremist leader. They still have time to make a different choice, because protecting democracy requires people who disagree about politics and policy to put those differences aside when the very foundations of self-government itself are at risk.

Now the choice that Ruby and Shea made, and the choice too many center right electeds have made, are representative of thousands of similar choices that are being made on each side of the pro and anti democracy ledger. Add it all up, you basically get a draw in which our democracy is teetering on the edge.

But, therein lies our opportunity to tip the balance, because we all [01:24:00] have choices to make as well. Yes, to vote, and we must do that, but just as importantly, choices about how we relate to one another as citizens. I know it may seem like a quaint notion, but how we act towards one another is fundamental to democracy.

These are the habits of the heart. that Alexis de Tocqueville credited as being responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States. Because how our elected officials behave and how our government functions is almost always downstream of how we act as citizens. If we meet our neighbors differences with suspicion and fear and hostility, our elected officials are likely to do the same. And authoritarians thrive on that sort of division and hatred.

Autocrats want to feed our fears, because when we're afraid, we're more likely to see a strongman as a necessary means of protection. But if we make a different choice, we choose [01:25:00] to meet our neighbors differences as opportunities, for curiosity and for connection, our elected officials will eventually follow suit as well.

And then we put democracy on home court advantage against authoritarianism. But right now, I'm kind of acting too much out of fear, right? Fear our democracy is dying, and that's causing us to be hostile to one another. And I will admit, I am guilty of this, too, right? So I want to share something I've been reflecting on that is helping me reorient how I think about and approach this moment.

It's a verse from a Leonard Cohen song, appropriately titled Democracy, and it goes like this. "It's coming to America first. The cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here we got the range and the machinery for change. It's here we got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely [01:26:00] say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way. Democracy is coming to the USA." You know, we tend to think of the moment we're in in negative terms, as a dark and scary time, portending the end of democracy. But in our long journey as a nation and a world, in our long quest to achieve the thing we've aspired to but never had, a truly inclusive, multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious democracy, each major advance towards that goal has been preceded by a crucible of crisis and conflict. When brave Black Americans marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to secure the right to vote, there's no downplaying the pain, suffering, cracked skulls that they endured. But they led our nation to the fuller democracy on the other side. [01:27:00] 

I think we're living through a similar moment. The last gasp of an old order making its final stand against the future. And if we do as the lyrics suggest, if we open our hearts in a fundamental way to each other, on the other side of this crisis, democracy, true democracy, I am confident, is coming to the USA.

Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood: What Led to Trump II, and What to Do About It - Speaking Out of Place - Air Date 11-12-24

 So where is there hope? How do you make it through the day? How are your, how is your affect going and how do you manage? And then where do we see possible sources of hope and solidarity? We've touched a little bit on it by like close out with, yeah, yeah.

I'm reviving this thing I did back in the Trump year, the original Trump years of reading Eliza and she like expresses distress and taught me not to talk like this. So I'm trying to keep myself under control for Trump too. Yeah, I needed to have some. Boundaries during [01:28:00] the first Trump administration, because I write about politics, I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I just felt that at least like maybe after dinner, like I shouldn't have to think about it anymore.

But there's always a fresh horror. This is like every hour, there's a fresh horror. This is hard for Doug to log off and stop talking about after dinner. So I don't know what we're going to do about that. I stopped myself last night. You did. Yeah. That's not how I remember it. It could have been much worse.

Believe me, it could have been worse. Like so many things that could have been worse. This is, this sounds really silly to say, but you did ask. So in the, in the first Trump administration, I. Returned to a long abandoned habit of reading novels and just have ever since then, basically from 2017 to the present, I've made sure that I'm always reading a novel [01:29:00] and that's something that I do in the evenings and I don't go on the internet as much as possible.

Also, uh, for me, it's important to get outside, be in nature, wherever you are, it's beautiful to know the wildlife and the mangrove. It's beautiful to see the birds in the park. Yeah, absolutely. No, I get it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Every now and then I try to go back to my old habit of reading poetry, but I think the internet is strong.

So I can't, that's, it's not, yeah, poems are short because they do require an intense degree of concentration. So I'm really, that's where I'm going to just go and sit in the corner and read Wallace Stevens or like we go out and go see art. Yeah. We do. Yeah. Yeah. We just, yes. And, but above all this is, and this is really the most important thing.

And I think I'm not the first person who's saying this, but getting together with people in the community, just we really need to. Hang out with our friends, [01:30:00] we need to organize and be in community that way, but we also need to be with people. And I have found that as really has been helping. Yeah, well, I'm, I'm pretty active with, uh, our local DSA political education committee and that's also, it's nice to have comrades be doing something constructive and you love search.

of interest in DSA after a bit of languishing, so that's good. Yeah, huge interest. Yeah, many new members, a lot of interest, a lot of activity. And the fact that the Democrats showed themselves to be not up to the task. Yeah, it encourages people to look to the left. Exactly. That's encouraging. Yeah, it's just nice to have a feeling of comradeship and being part of this.

Well, that's doing our best to fight the horror. What I did. So these are real bright spots. If we think back to the first Trump administration, as awful as it was, actually DSA grew a lot. We had a complete revolution in our state [01:31:00] government where the most reactionary Democrats were voted out. And we have a much more progressive state legislature that has remained in there.

Many of them DSA endorsed since then. And that we do have a terrible mayor. We have a terrible, hoping to do something about that next year. Yeah, exactly. We're working on that. And so I think that it's been, we were, the Trump administration was so awful. We can't possibly think about going back. But then.

It's interesting how some of the good things that have been happening in the last few days, like there's a bit of interest in DSA, this resurgence of people engaging with the union have actually reminded me that time wasn't as completely bad as I had remembered the first time that Trump doesn't put us in jail.

Yeah, but, but I feel like that's compared to how much some people are actually going to suffer. I don't know. So that he did promise [01:32:00] and the pro Palestinian movement on campus, whatever that means, but I guess he could have used federal aid as a weapon. The Democrats also would have loved to have done that.

Exactly. And he's probably gonna happen up probably. But it's hard to compare the stance of repression toward that movement is so bi partisan, I, I can't, I feel like I can't put all that on, but it's the opposite of things can be worse. Things can always get worse.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Know Your Enemy, F*cking Cancelled, The Bitchuation Room, Speaking Out of Place, and a TED talk from Ian Bassin. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to [01:33:00] Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today—at a discount—at bestoftheleft.com/support or through our Patreon page. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion and don't forget to follow us on any and all of the new social media platforms you may be migrating to during the exodus these days. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, [01:34:00] my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.


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