Air Date 1/21/2025
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left Podcast. Decades ago, the conscious decision was made to exacerbate any quality for the sake of economic growth that would supposedly lift all boats. What probably wasn't understood at the time is that the logical conclusion of that choice would be to break democracy and usher in oligarchy. Now, working people are left with only bad choices and empty promises.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today includes Confronting Capitalism, The Majority Report, Pitchfork Economics, Lever Time, The Marc Steiner Show, and The Dig. Then, in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections. Section A: Party Reckoning; Section B: Neoliberal Stranglehold; Section C: Crossed Wires with a Focus on the Reorganization of the Republican Party; and Section D: Solutions.
Workers Without a Party - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 12-11-24
MELISSA NASCHEK: One thing that you really point out in [00:01:00] your recent Jacobin article is a huge contradiction that this wing of the party is is going to have to confront or potentially continue losing.
So you write in your article that the Democratic Party is kind of putting an increasing amount of distance between itself and the working class. And the interesting thing that happened compared to 2016—there were some roots and signs of it there, but this dynamic really manifested in this election, in 2024—is that now this working class alienation is not just with the white working class that was so heavily demonized in 2016, but that working class alienation is extending across racial lines now.
What do you think are the roots of the Democratic Party's increasing alienation from the working class?
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: I mean, some of [00:02:00] these roots, I think, are not specific to the United States, they're specific to the political economy of advanced capitalism generally. And what that particular dynamic is, is that on the one hand, all the parties of the left within Europe, within the antipodes in the United States and Canada, all these parties have over the past 50 years shifted from being parties that fought for the interests of working people and then tried to manage the institutional constraints of capitalism.
They've transformed from that to being essentially managerial parties that are much more attuned to the preferences and the interests of the corporate class, and really are increasingly distancing themselves from their historical constituencies, which is the working class.
And you see across the board, workers losing confidence that these parties represent them, and one of two things that's been happening. They either are opting out of politics altogether. You see this everywhere. [00:03:00] working class people are just becoming so cynical that they are simply not taking part in the political process. And the others are shifting to alternatives, whoever they think might actually fight for them.
So the one root of this alienation has been the generic phenomenon of all the center left or left wing parties becoming managerial parties. Now in the United States, it has a particular trajectory. If you look at the historical Turnout and the electoral preferences of voters, there's been a decline in their voting for the Democrats or identifying in terms of their political identification with the Democrats really since I would say the late 70s it started to weaken, but there've been two really important episodes.
One was the mid 90s, really after NAFTA, where you see a huge drop in working class voting for Democrats in presidential and congressional elections. And the second is around the second Obama presidency when you see it. These are the two episodes in which [00:04:00] has happened in both of them. Same reason they saw their party, either in the case of NAFTA Clobbering them with the free trade agreement, or in the case of Obama turning away from all the promises he's made to them.
MELISSA NASCHEK: I want to talk a little bit more about NAFTA because this is something that you and some other left wing commentators have mentioned as a big turning point in both Democratic Party politics, their policy agenda, and specifically the party's relationship to the working class.
Can you explain a little bit more about what NAFTA is, and why it has such a big impact on the working class?
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: Well, NAFTA stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement. And what it essentially did was removed a lot of the trade barriers between Canada and the United States and Mexico and the United States.
So, in removing those barriers, much cheaper goods came into the country, which American manufacturers couldn't compete with, and so it resulted in layoffs. The [00:05:00] other related factor here was what's called the China trade, which is cheap goods from China flooding the markets, which again, American manufacturers aren't able to compete with, which again, results in these layoffs.
Now, the important point here is it's under Clinton that both of these phenomena really start taking off. In both cases, he knew exactly what was going to happen. This is important because it's a conscious decision on the Democrats part to prioritize these economic policies over the predictable electoral consequences that came from them.
Now, why did that happen? In my opinion, it's because it was the midpoint of a longer term Democratic strategy of trying to orient themselves away from what they thought was a losing electoral constituency, which is the blue collar and low skill clerical working class, towards higher income groups.
Now why is it losing? There are analyses out there [00:06:00] that say, well it has to do with the demographic fact that workers are shrinking in size as a part of the electoral coalition. Kind of, but if they were really committed to a New Deal style redistributive politics they would adjust to the shrinking number of voters by crafting a wider coalition around those same goals, which is maintaining redistributive social democratic policies.
The question is, why didn't they fight to reintegrate themselves into a viable electoral coalition? It's because their political priorities have changed. So, in a very real sense, voters bolting from the Democratic party was not that much of a concern to them because, by that time, the Democratic party is trying to engineer a new electoral coalition anyway. And so, if the effect of NAFTA or free trade with China is to piss off working class voters so they don't [00:07:00] link up with the party anymore, the party kind of shrugs and says, we can live with that.
Democrats Bungled The 2024 Election WAY Worse Than We Thought - The Majority Report - Air Date 1-8-25
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: As we get more data out as to why Democrats lost, and I, and I phrase it that way specifically based upon the data. There's a good piece I think he's got a Substack, Michael Podhorzer, he was the former political director for the AFL CIO, now does data analysis. Long story short, the bottom line is that the election in 2024 was not an embrace of Republicans or MAGA beyond what it was in 2020, it was essentially a vote of no confidence in Democrats. And most of that vote of no confidence came by just staying home.
He's done an extensive report here, but essentially, the popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and Republicans. [00:08:00] Essentially, most of Harris's losses were due to an anti MAGA surge voters staying home. The people who came out motivated by negative partisanship in 2018 and in 2020 and to some extent, less so in 2022, just essentially stayed home in 2024, and there's a couple of things that you can garner from that.
One is people didn't have a sense of what Trump's policies were or they weren't worried about it in the in the way to motivate them to come out and vote for Harris. They weren't motivated to vote for him, but they just they weren't motivated to leave and there was nothing that the democrats were offering or at least communicating as to what they were offering that [00:09:00] motivated these people to leave their homes and come out and vote for Harris.
Trump essentially got the same percentage of eligible voters as he did in 2020. And obviously that number goes up because our populations go up. Whereas Harris essentially got 19 million votes less or, or as to what she would have had she hit the same portion of eligible voters had voted for her.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's also the first time since the 1960s that a majority of Americans in the lower income voting block, which is voters earning less than $50,000 a year, voted Republican in terms of that majority share, and you can probably draw a line to when we see how Democrats lost so much ground in urban areas in blue states. Those are probably more low propensity Democratic partisans who didn't show [00:10:00] out. And the question is, then, why are we tailoring these campaigns to suburbanites? But also, frankly, how much did the genocide in Gaza and the administration's support of that, and how It just showed such a lack of regard for the lives of people who are not white or wealthy, really, how much that affected turnout.
I think that based on what we saw in AOC asking her constituents, she has a majority Latino district the exact kind of district they lost ground in, that was one of the many reasons that were listed and given to her as to why people didn't show up.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I think absolutely. And again, we've talked about this ad nauseum. I think it's like a there's a first order people who refused to vote based upon what was happening in Gaza. And then the second order in that a lot of activists who may have actually gone out and cast a vote for Harris, but were just less motivated and found it more difficult to go motivate people. And I don't know if we'll ever know specifically how [00:11:00] those break down. It's possible that the first order numbers could actually be higher than the second order, but certainly they combine. And then on top of that, you also have to remember, I mean, despite the fact that we've got Chuck Schumer saying this weekend that Democratic voters didn't know what Joe Biden did for them.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Whose fault is that? It's Biden's fault for being unable to communicate and hanging in there. And also, like, if that's the case, that's still a problem with the party structure, because you have to be able to do politics if you're a political party.
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But I would also argue that, There was also a failure to recognize a lot of the loss that took place under Biden, even from stuff that Biden and the Democrats provided in the first place, but to expect this cohort of voters to be savvy enough to know that something that they got, that came a month after Donald Trump left office and then was taken away two years into Biden's administration, they're [00:12:00] not going around going like, "it's a bummer about that $300 per child tax credit that I'm not getting anymore, but I know it was, it was Joe Manchin and it was Kyrsten Sinema."
This gets to, and we said this at the time, the failure of Biden to strike while the iron was hot in the spring of 2021, coming off the big win for the American Rescue Act, when Republicans were still talking about Dr. Seuss not publishing two of its books or something, and Joe Manchin was talking, maybe Build Back Better should actually be bigger than what Bernie says. Maybe it should be 6 trillion, that was the time to strike. But instead, what Joe Biden did is invite Republicans in to give them a proposal over the course of like two months. Then when that failed, invited Sinema and, and Portman to come in and provide their attempt at some bipartisanship for build back better. And this is a mistake that the Republicans will not make. They will not [00:13:00] make.
They have three more votes in the Senate than the Democrats did, but that's not enough to overcome a filibuster. And, and they may not have a Manchin and Sinema, but in the spring of 2021, Manchin was not Manchin yet. He was certainly latent, but this is why failures of actually legislation and legislating and leading implicate an election, I know this sounds crazy, three years later.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (with Gary Gerstle) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 1-14-25
Nick Hanauer: Gary, as you must know, we talk about neoliberalism a lot on this podcast. Our podcast is largely devoted to tearing down neoliberalism and replacing it with a new thing. But for the purposes of this interview, it would be useful to start with your personal definition of neoliberalism. What do you think it is and we’ll proceed from there?
GARY GERSTLE: Neoliberalism is an ideology that calls for freeing capitalism from virtually all constraints, free the animal spirits of [00:14:00] capitalism and the market out of the belief that the greatest economic growth and thus, the greatest good for the greatest number of people will result from that kind of emancipation. And by freeing it from constraints, I’m thinking of regulatory constraints imposed by governments and states during the golden era of social democracy in Europe. And then we might say the golden era of the New Deal order in the United States. It was from the start, a global project. Dismantling control of capital has to be accomplished both domestically but also, internationally out of the belief that you cannot have the full yield of capitalist affluence unless the whole world is committed to this project. At the core of neoliberalism is a commitment to the free movement of goods, the free movement of people, the free movement of [00:15:00] information, and the free movement of capital across all borders.
It could not really become a global project and thus aspire to the success it had in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century until the Soviet Union fell and communism as a relevant ideology in the world collapsed. Because central to the communist project was not just state management of economies in the public interest, but the exclusion of capital and capitalist penetration from any countries that were under communist rule. So, the 1989 to ’91 period of transition is crucial. I’ll say one other thing about it and then you can let me know your own thoughts about neoliberalism because you do talk about it a lot. Is it entirely an elite project? The proponents of neoliberalism acknowledge that it increases inequality in the world, that the gap between the rich and the poor would widen, but the supporters say that’s okay [00:16:00] because all boats will rise.
Everyone at the end of the day will be better off. That was the claim of neoliberalism. From that perspective, you can see it as an elite project in the sense that there would be benefits for everyone but the richest would have the greatest share of the benefits. There was not an acknowledgement of that there would be trade-offs, that this was a zero-sum game, that the gains of some classes domestically and some nations internationally would be at the cost of other nations or portions of nations suffering. That belief in the validity of neoliberalism and its value characterized the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. It was believable and sellable as an ideology until the global financial crash of 2008, 2009, which gave a lie to the claim that all boats would rise and that no one would suffer under this new regime. There’s no [00:17:00] doubt that the neoliberal age dramatically increased inequality, left a lot of parts of the world, both in the United States and elsewhere to rot.
The world in which we’re living in now has to do with the consequences. But I also think that there is an emancipatory element of the neoliberal creed, which distinguishes my view of neoliberalism from some other people, that it carries with it a promise of freedom, of freeing the individual from constraints of allowing that individual to fully flourish. And especially in the United States, that has enormous appeal and that was part of Reagan’s popularity. You convert to my vision of market freedom, meaning Reagan’s vision of market freedom, you will be free. You will have opportunity that you did not have before. You’ll be free of artificial constraints, which are not simply imposed by large private institutions but by large public institutions as well. So, I talk about the new left of the 1960s and [00:18:00] ’70s, which opposed not just capital but big government and saw the New Deal as oppressive because in the language of the time, there was a system of corporation and government alliance, which was squashing the individuality and the individual opportunity of particular people.
There’s a cosmopolitan vision, which is part of the neoliberal dream, the ability of people to travel everywhere in the world, to mix with other peoples, other cultures, other ways of living, which the left finds enormously appealing. If you’re on the left, this is a world in which you want to live. So, there’s a component of the neoliberal world view which is appealing to people on the left side of the political spectrum. And there’s a kind of seduction that goes on that this will benefit not just corporate capitalists accumulating capital, but this promises an enlarged vision of freedom that a [00:19:00] lot of people can partake of.
How Democrats Can Win Back The Working Class - Lever Time - Air Date 11-8-24
ARJUN SINGH - SENIOR PRODUCER, LEVER TIME: Is there anything to the idea that there was an information ecosystem gap, if you will? And what I mean is that, in the closing days of the campaign, You saw Donald Trump and JD Vance go on Joe Rogan's podcast. Kamala Harris didn't go on Joe Rogan's podcast. She was appearing on podcasts like Call Her Daddy though. But basically that, to be able to reach not just a minority of voters, but what sounds like to reach a significant amount of voters, the kinds of voters who will be able to swing an election in one direction or the candidates have to go into these niche media ecosystem, whether that's Joe Rogan's podcast, Alex Cooper's podcast, the Undertaker's podcast. And that was somewhere that the Harris campaign either seemed to struggle with, or maybe more that the Trump campaign really excelled at.
But what do you think about the media ecosystem idea and that now [00:20:00] campaigns have to really look at the ecosystem as a constellation of different enterprises versus we're going to deal with the Washington press corps and then there's the local and regional press corps. Now you have to really look at it more as a map rather than a linear group of media organizations you're talking to.
JEFF WEAVER: Yeah, from the Bernie campaign, Bernie went almost anywhere they would have him, because he wanted to talk to people. He didn't care about the host or the host's views, he wanted to talk to the audience. He was criticized loudly by many the Democratic Party for being one of the first people to really go on a Fox. He did a Fox town hall in Pennsylvania. That was the infamous town hall when they asked the Fox-picked audience whether they supported Bernie Sanders socialist health care plan and everybody in the audience raised their hands to the shock of the of the moderators So , yes, there is.
I think the other problem is that the mainstream media is now viewed as a partisan. So you have Fox, which is clearly the Republican side. You've MSNBC They call it MSDNC, not [00:21:00] unfairly they call it that. CNN has had a Dr. Frankenstein problem since 2016 when they helped elect Trump. They've been trying to kill him since. If you watch Jim Acosta's show on CNN in the morning, the guy should be on Kamala Harris's FEC report. It's incredible. I support Kamala Harris and oppose Trump, but you just watch it as a political observer and you're like, "Holy smokes, this guy is a commercial for Kamala Harris." And, other forms of media just are not big enough in many ways to break through, but I do think it is a mistake to not talk to as broad a swath of voters as you can, with some kind of virtue signaling about Joe Rogan.
DAVID SIROTA: I would also add to that that there's a chicken or the egg problem here.
The Democrats and the Democratic infrastructure has been hostile to alternative media conduits in a way that the Republicans haven't, and that's been for I don't know 10 15 years. So the point is is that alternate independent media that the democrats could try to cultivate and [00:22:00] build is a longer term project to get to a point where engaging with them in an election is worthwhile and reaching a large audience. The Republicans have worked to create that. The Democrats haven't, and so here we are.
It seems like most democratic elected officials are most obsessed with getting booked on MSNBC, whereas Donald Trump is running around to anybody that's got any kind of audience to try to connect him with disaffected voters. I guess what it's saying is there's almost a class analysis in there, is that the Democratic elected leadership and party structure is interested mostly in talking with the kinds of voters that it did well among which are elite, affluent, upper-middle-class liberal voters, not necessarily interested in talking to a larger audience. Do you agree with that?
JEFF WEAVER: I do, but I would say this I think there's a lot of people who would take the Trump example at the Democratic Party establishment who would say that that's a dangerous thing. These platforms give someone like Trump a voice. [00:23:00] If you open it up on the Democratic side, you might be giving a left populist voice who would then displace them. Trump has displaced a lot of the traditional republican power structure. That's not a lesson learned for them, that's not a positive. You think the members of the DNC are really interested in having a left populist voice go out on the liberal or the Democratic blue media of some kind and blowing them away. I don't think so. Trump's success may reinforce the worst in those folks.
DAVID SIROTA: That's a really interesting point. What are the incentives of the Democratic party? Talk to us a little bit about that, this idea that the Democratic Party presents a brand of we're trying to win elections, but the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party are such that there is a lot of self preservation. That's any organization like Individuals are interested in preserving their own power, their own wealth, their own ability to make a living, etc, etc, but it seems like what you're alluding to is that there's a conflict of interest at the heart of the Democratic Party that [00:24:00] staying in power in the Democratic Party as it exists now, no matter how many elections it's winning or losing seems to be the top priority and the pervasive culture of the Democratic Party, not necessarily winning elections.
I guess what I'm getting at is, the idea of winning elections being more electorally powerful, but reshaping the party so that this the people who are in the party right now have less power. That's a battle because you're battling with self interest. You're battling with people who are trying to hold their territory. Is that basically right?
JEFF WEAVER: Well, it's true as an outsider. Those individuals are convinced that the presentation of the issues and their framing is correct. They believe it themselves that they're right and that the rest of the country is wrong. That's a difficult position to hold in a democracy and be successful.
Other countries, when you have bad elections, they replace leaders. In both parties in this country, that doesn't happen. You lose an election in England, the party leader who's in [00:25:00] the prime minister does not become the minority leader. That person is out.
DAVID SIROTA: I was going to ask about that. Zephyr Teachout wrote a piece in The Nation saying that Chuck Schumer needs to resign. And I think it's fair to say in most other countries when you get shellacked in an election, it's goodbye. That doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe it'll happen now. I guess it gets to my question of, if the Democratic Party can't change leadership now, after this kind of election, what does it say about the party itself? What does it say about American politics? How could it not have to change after what just happened?
JEFF WEAVER: Look, I think what a lot of people are going to rely on is trump self destructing. They're going to say, "oh, look, he got in there. People now are going to remember why they got rid of them last time. And if we just hold on, we'll win in the midterms and then we'll retake the presidency, and the insanity will be over in 2028. Of course, the insanity was supposed to be over in 2020, but the insanity will be over in 2028 and we'll move on". And these people have [00:26:00] convinced themselves that Trump is some kind of anomalous unicorn. Leaders don't make history, history makes leaders. And, he's taking steps now to institutionalize his brand of politics, Republican party, his vice presidential running mate would be probably worse for the country than Trump, I have to say, because he'll be more effective and more focused in an ideological way on changing the nature of government and its relationship to people.
Why Elites Love Identity Politics - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 1-1-25
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: But, make no mistake. Identity stuff didn't cause her defeat, but it absolutely sealed the deal on the defeat. It was a big factor, and to ignore that is just folly. So that then raises your question. How did she become, and her party become identified with it, and what role did it play? Why do I say it did play a big role? So let me try to address both things.
First of all, it played a big role in her defeat, because even though she steered clear from it, the last, I would say, six or eight years, the party has been propagating it in a really fulsome, in a very aggressive way.[00:27:00]
So, at the 11th hour, to suddenly not address it or to steer away from it, didn't fool anyone. And that's why Trump's ads were so effective in attacking her as somebody pushing identity politics down people's throats, was that they'd been doing it for eight years now. Why, in the recent past especially? Well, actually they've been pursuing it for a while. But again, with so many things in our political moment, it goes back to the initial Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Party's answer to Bernie Sanders' propagation of economic justice and economic issues was to smear him as somebody who ignored the plight of what they love to call, their new term, marginalized groups, which is people of color, women, trans people, all matters dealing with sexuality. This is their counter to the Sanders campaign. They've done it assiduously now for eight years. So if in the [00:28:00] last two months they pull away from it, who do they think they're fooling? Literally nobody. So, that's why the turn away from it failed. Because it just seemed so ham handed and so insincere. Nobody bought it.
MELISSA NASCHEK: Right.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: The deeper question is what you just raised. Which is, why are they identified with it? Why have they embraced it? Well, from the moment of the Sanders campaign, it's clear why they embraced it, and we can come back to that in a moment to go deeper into that. But there's a longer historical legacy. They are or have been the party that's pursued race and gender equity for quite a while now. So why is that? It's, I think it's a historical legacy in two ways, okay?
The first is an obvious one. Coming out of the 1960s, when what's called the new social movements emerged, which is the antiracism movements, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, Coming out of the 60s, this was the party that upheld and supported those demands, even when they were real [00:29:00] demand, demands for the masses, not just for elites, this party supported them. So unlike the Republicans who were the party of the ancien regime, you would say, of the resistance to the feminist movement, the resistance to the civil rights movement. So that's one historical legacy.
The second legacy is slightly more subtle, which is that coming out of the New Deal era, the Democrats, as their most important electoral constituency, was the working class. And working class, and the unionized working class in particular, was located in the cities, in large urban centers, because that's where the factories were. Now, what happened after the 80s, as cities transformed because of deindustrialization and the rise of new sectors, was that the geographical location of that electoral base didn't change. It was still cities, but the cities changed. Whereas [00:30:00] cities used to be the place where blue collar workers and unions were centered, by the early 2000s, cities became reorganized around new sectors: finance, real estate—what's called FIRE—insurance, the services, more high end income groups.
So in a way, if the Democrats hadn't done anything, if they had just continued to say, let's focus on the cities, they would have found that their electoral coalition has shifted from workers in the cities to whoever is now living in the cities, which is more affluent groups. And that meant then that affluent groups became the base of the party, and race and gender became reconceptualized around the experiences and the demands of those affluent groups. Okay? These are the two big historical legacies.
Now, a less significant but still salient point is this. After the 70s, in the interim, between the 70s and 2000s, in [00:31:00] both of these groups, minorities and women, the movements declined. And the place that the movements had was taken over by elected officials and the NGOs.
MELISSA NASCHEK: Right.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: So, for example, take the issue of race. The Black working class had a voice inside the Democratic Party through the CIO, through the trade unions, and they brought antiracism into the party through the prism of the needs of Black workers. Now, when the unions are dismantled and the trade unionism in general goes into decline, who is voicing the concerns of "people of color", of Blacks?
It's not going to be the more affluent Blacks that have come up through the post-Civil Rights Era. It's going to be Black political officials. And those Black political officials, by the 2000s, are spread all across the country. There's a huge rise in the number of Black elected officials, mayors, congressmen, Et cetera, et cetera. [00:32:00] And they now no longer have any reason to cater to working class Blacks because they're politically disorganized. What they are now is captured by the same economic forces as White politicians are, but they get to have the corner on race talk.
So what happens then is by the time people your age are coming into politics, people in their 20s, in the early to mid 2000s, race talk and gender talk has been transformed to some degree catering to the needs of working women and working class Blacks and Latinos to largely being taken over by the more affluent groups who are the electoral base of the Democratic Party in the cities, the politicos who now have increased in number tremendously, the NGOs who do a lot of the kind of spade work and the consultancy for the party.
What's missing is 70 to 80 percent of those groups who happen to be working people. [00:33:00] The Democrats, then, as the party of race, as the party of gender, is actually the party of race among the wealthier minorities in the party of gender as conceptualized by organizations like NOW, which are essentially just, you know, catering to wealthier women.
That's the historical legacy, and that's why, within the party, this was the natural response to Sanders because they were able to draw on this experience and draw on this legacy since that legacy is real.
The failures of liberals and the Left have helped Trump's rise - The Marc Steiner Show - Air Date 10-30-24
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah, I think about this a lot since the Republicans are such inveterate norm breakers, the story a lot of mainstream Democrats say in return is that we have to uphold norms, right? I mean, if something bad is happening, you did the opposite of that bad thing. And there was a wonderful piece in New Republic by the Pulitzer Prize winning, historian, Jefferson Cowie, whose, if you haven't read [00:34:00] his Freedom's Dominion about how the word freedom became an alibi for coercion in American history through the experience of a single Alabama County, he pointed out that every time democracy truly won a structural victory against the court, the forces of reaction or stagnation, it was through a brazen act of norm breaking. If you think about the fact that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the military reconstruction of the South, the laws that enabled that passed before any Southerners were let back into Congress. Right? I mean, can you imagine how like the Obamas and Clintons would freak out if you said, oh, well, we need to defeat fascism by ignoring, you know, the votes of the states that have become fascist. Right? If you look at something like, you know, Roosevelt's court packing plan, right?
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Yeah.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Nothing in the New Deal would have happened [00:35:00] unless he had threatened basically the Supreme Court with political, the existing Supreme Court, the incumbent Supreme Court, with political disillusion unless they allow something like the Social Security Act to be declared constitutional, you know? And then finally, this is a very obscure thing in history, most people don't know about this, but it's probably one of the most fascinating things that ever happened. In 1961, JFK realized that no liberal legislation would ever pass because the rules committee and the House of Representatives was ruled with an iron fist by a guy, you might remember this name, Judge Howard Smith, very reactionary Virginia conservative and a coalition he had of Democrats and Republicans who just turned it into a graveyard for every liberal legislation.
So he arranged for the size of the rules committee to expand and added three members without which Civil Rights Act never would have passed, the Voting Rights would never [00:36:00] would have passed, Medicare never would have passed, Medicaid never would have passed, any liberal's legislation would have passed. And it was just by cheating, really. So, unless we kind of figure out, within the realm of kind of under the Capitol dome, kind of top down institutional Democratic Party stuff, unless they kind of get over their kind of Boy Scout attitude and realize some judicious norm breaking might be required, we might be stuck in this miasma for all of our lifetimes.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Let me just say this, Marc. Another way of putting what Rick just said is that when Michelle Obama said, "When they go low, we go high", that was, like, wrong. When they go low, when they go low, we snap the rug from under them and let them collapse.
RICK PERLSTEIN: When you meet them halfway, that makes it easier for them to spit at you.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: That's right. I mean, I think that the problem, [00:37:00] that, Rick, you just summed it up so well, this assumption of normality, the assumption that we have to be the adults in the room, you know, it's like, you remember the example I gave to you once, Marc, about the Battle of the Crater, Petersburg, Virginia.
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: You remember that?
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Yes.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Right? I don't know if you ever heard this story, Rick. Do you ever know about, have you ever heard about the Battle of the Crater?
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: It's worth telling. Go ahead.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: So, what happened is, 1864, Union troops surrounded Petersburg, and Confederate defenses were very formidable. So, the Union troops developed a brilliant idea of building this tunnel underneath the Confederate defenses, loading it up with high explosives, and the idea when you set this off and blow the Confederate line. And in the explosion would be so massive, it would not only kill, but it would throw the Confederates into disarray.
So they do this, and the explosion was [00:38:00] massive, and it created this crater. And the Confederate forces that survived were running chaotically back towards Petersburg as a result of this. The Union troops went into the crater and stopped and they sat there and they looked around in marvel at the extent of this devastation, body parts and everything else, and at a certain point the Confederates realized they weren't being chased. They reorganized, came back and massacred the Union soldiers.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Right.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: The Obama administration blew a giant hole in the Confederate line, Republicans. And instead of us going through and chasing these guys to extinction. We sat in a hole, marveling over this great historical event, the election of the first Black president and him playing the [00:39:00] role of the braided belt in the living room, right? And we missed the moment and allowed the Confederates to reorganize and they came back as the Tea Party, and we've been paying the price ever since.
Democratic Dealignment w Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - The Dig - Air Date 11-9-24
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: To close out, I think we can, I think we would both agree that the left has nowhere near the sort of mass organization that we require to govern, instead of sort of meekly petition the governing class. Where should we be focusing strategically our organizing efforts? I mean, two things that come to mind to me always are our labor and and housing.
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I think labor is paramount and it's often missing in our discussions about what the future [00:40:00] holds. You know, we look at police brutality. We look at this campaign. We look at that campaign. But really, I think in order to make a qualitative difference, these campaigns actually have to be connected to the labor movement. And so, you know, I think Chicago Teachers Union has always been a powerful example of how you tie bread and butter issues to the broader social issues and what they and others describe as social movement unionism. And so, you know, I think there needs to be more discussions and collaborations like that.
I think Shawn Fain at the UAW is kind of a figure cut from that mold. And to what extent has Fain been drawn into some of these broader political conversations about where do we go from here? And not just, I know that there is, Fain has been instrumental in stacking [00:41:00] contracts for 2028, which I think is a, you know, exemplar strategy and how do we connect that to the social movements, right?
How do we connect that to the social questions, the political questions that will, we know in this period, find organizational expression. And so that is a key issue. And then, you know, I think that the question of labor and the insurgent union drives are important in the sense that these are often young people who are at work, but who are also connected to these other kinds of social questions.
And so to me, the big issue is the need to break through this wall that sees the labor movement as some kind of old thing over there, and the social movements that don't [00:42:00] really have the political, economic, or social weight to accomplish their goals. How do we bring these things together? And again, that is always the prob- those things don't happen out of good luck. They don't happen because they should. They happen because of political organizing. They happen because of political perspectives. And that is what we have to create the space for.
And that has been part of the ongoing frustration, is that we haven't created the spaces to map out those kinds of tactical, strategic political discussions that are linked to historical theoretical discussions about, 'What is it that we're fighting for? What are, what is the ultimate intention of all of this activism?' That has to be also integrated into the discussion about [00:43:00] how we- what kind of activism or movement facilitates the possibility of the kind of social transformation that we're talking about. And so these are multi level conversations because very quickly, there will be lots for us to respond to.
If we can think back, even though 2016, 2017 won't repeat itself, you know, in the same way, we have some indication, right? The part of Trump's strategy. In 2017 was, I think we described it as shock and awe, that there were just so many outrageous things happening at the same time as a way to really overwhelm the left, because you'd have to respond to the Muslim ban. He's appointing, you know, the CEO of Exxon to be the head of [00:44:00] the EPA. He's appointing some horrible New York developer to be the head of HUD. They will try to pass a, you know, abortion ban. They probably won't start with the abortion ban. They'll start with legislation that makes the morning after pill illegal.
I mean, there's- there will be an onslaught of things that we will be forced to respond to. But what can't happen is that the rapid response to the shock and awe, the Trump administration undermines these bigger political questions about organization strategy and tactics that have to take place. Because this is what always happens, right? It's the expedient response to the immediate issue in front of us. And then it feels like the next step to stop having to [00:45:00] respond to every single issue, means we got to get the Democrat in. So you already know that more likely than not, they're going to get the House. So they're going to have the three wings of government for the first two years of the Trump administration.
The pressure to stop every single thing anyone is doing to win back the House in 2026 is just going to be unbelievable. And this is what happens. And then 2026 comes, and then we know if Trump's not dead, that there'll be some Republican knuckle dragger who will be the worst thing that we've ever heard of, which means all hands on deck. Everything must end now to get Josh Shapiro or some other hack from the Democratic Party into [00:46:00] office. And so that's, we know that's the cycle. And everything that we do then, gets put on hold forever. Because there's never a good time, when the Republicans are always lurking, you know, in the shadows, there's never a good time to do the work that we need to do.
So this is part of the political challenge. These are the discussions that we have to be having now. How do we build these organizations? And how do we continue to engage with these conversations while having to attend to the inevitable crises that are unleashed by whatever Trump, Bannon, Stephen Miller, have in store for us.
Why Elites Love Identity Politics Part 2 - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 1-1-25
MELISSA NASCHEK: So now we're at kind of an interesting point where the Democrats have used this strategy to great success, at least, at crushing the left. [00:47:00] And now it's having a huge negative impact on the perception of the party and their reputation as a party that's going to fight for the downtrodden. So given how discredited identity politics has been, at least how the Democratic Party has practiced it, what kind of relationship should the left have to identity politics, if it should have any relationship to it?
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: The left should very aggressively and actively fight against social domination of any kind, whether it's gender, race, or sexuality. It has to do that. It has to, however, do it in a way that expands beyond the interests of the wealthy and actually addresses the interests of working people, working women, working minorities, right? Which means then that it should take advantage of this opening to bring race and gender justice back to what it was in its, what I would call, its glory days in the 1950s and 60s, [00:48:00] where it was actively a component of the working class movement.
So the way I think you essentially, people like Sanders, people like Shawn Fain, who's been behind the incredible resurgence of the UAW, I think that they're already doing this work where they're saying that we need to address the incredible race and gender disparities in this country, but the way we do it is by building a system cheap housing that's high quality, by making healthcare a right, by addressing the fact that poor schooling and poor jobs lock people of color into poverty for generations, and the only way out of it is not by addressing discrimination, but by addressing the quality of the jobs and the availability of jobs.
This was when the left actually moved the needle on racism in this country, when it actually affected the lives of millions upon millions of Latinos and Blacks. So, in my opinion, the left, the way it ought to respond to this opening, is to take up the [00:49:00] banner of race justice and gender justice. But don't call it identity politics, call it, you know, after school specials if you wanted to, call it something else. But in my opinion, you have to rhetorically separate yourself from this. It's been so long. There was a time when socialists used to look with contempt at the attempts of narrow elites to take over these movements. And I think my dream is for the left to regain the moral confidence and the social weight, and the only way that'll happen, the only way any of this will happen—we've talked about this before, and we'll keep coming back to it—the only way it happens is if socialists in this country become the voice of the left, rather than academics and politicos and media celebrities, and if socialists in this country come from these communities of working people, women and minorities, because they will have the confidence to tell these supposed spokespeople for these [00:50:00] issues to take a step back because they come from those populations, from those sectors that they're fighting for. So, we have to continue to try to promote working class candidates in elections. We have to continue to try to build trade unions. We have to continue to make sure that they're the ones expressing the demands along these race and gender lines, and it doesn't come from professors, from media celebrities, from politicians, because they will always steer it towards the narrow elite ends.
Note from the Editor on the path Democrats have charted
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Confronting Capitalism discussing the widening gap between the Democratic Party and the working class. The Majority Report explained why the election was more of a loss for Democrats than a win for Republicans. Pitchfork Economics explained the history of neoliberalism. Lever Time focused on the difficulty the left is having in messaging and maintaining an information ecosystem. Confronting Capitalism discussed the complicated role of identity politics in our shifting political landscape. The Marc Steiner Show looked at the strategic benefits of bending the [00:51:00] rules from time to time. The Dig discussed the need for greater connection with labor, for the left And Confronting Capitalism, using historical examples, showed the way to integrate both economic and social justice into organizing.
And those were just the top takes, there's a lot more in the deeper dive section. But first, a reminder that the show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed the you'll receive. Sign up to support the [email protected] slash support.
There's a link in the show notes through our Patrion page or from right inside the apple podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the 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. And also we're trying something new recently.
We're offering you the opportunity to submit comments and questions on upcoming topics. It takes us a little bit to put the shows together so I can give you a heads up. [00:52:00] And if it strikes your interest, you can send in your questions ahead of time. Next up we'll be tackling the LA fires and the broader interplay between fire and water in the age of climate change.
And then following that, we'll take a look at the apparent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and other updates on the region. So get your comments and questions. And now for those topics, you can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 2 0 2 9 9 9 3 9 9 1.
Or simply email me to J asbestos bluff.com. Now, as for today's topic, I have a few scattered thoughts first on the ongoing debate. Amongst the left between fighting discrimination with racial and gender justice frameworks, and the idea of economic populism that looks past structures of identity politics. I just want to echo what we've already been hearing and emphasize as strongly as possible that we can do both.
As evidence, one of the biggest and most accurate criticisms of the formal black lives matter organization coming from the right. [00:53:00] Is that it was full of Marxists. And it's true that there is a strong socialist thread running through the racial justice movement. And that should be all the evidence.
We need to see that there is not a conflict between the two, but a dovetailing that can easily link the movements. What we very much do not need is anyone attempting to divide us by pitting these ideas against one another as though they don't go hand in hand Socialist shouldn't think of social justice as a distraction from economic populism.
And we shouldn't believe anyone who argues that we can't take on the money to lead because doing so won't itself resolve racism or sexism.
Secondly on the topic of the democratic party, moving away from the demands of the working class. It's always important to remind people about the money primary. This is the bigger structural perspective. It's not just. How the Democrats work. It's certainly not about individual Democrats and how they feel. The money.
Primary is the structure that sits on top of our politics. We hold [00:54:00] primary and general elections to find our elected leaders, but before any of that happens, there's the money primary where potential candidates have to make themselves appealing to big money donors to find their campaigns. And all of that happens before any voters have a chance to weigh in. Now the misconception is often that politicians sell out their convictions for the sake of those big donors.
And that undoubtedly happens to some degree, but the reality is most people who are even in the room to make their pitch to those donors. Are already naturally appealing to big money and they don't actually have to change that much about themselves. There are people whose genuine beliefs don't include making drastic changes to the way capitalism is allowed to function in the country. Some of the big name, recent examples include after the housing market crash Obama. sort of famously told to the bankers that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks to which [00:55:00] I have always said, get out of the way, what are you doing? Then Hillary Clinton and her run against Bernie Sanders was making sort of straw man arguments saying that she, she never changed her vote based on donor influence.
But of course, that completely obfuscates the fact that. She was able to bring in all of those big dollar donations from banks and private prison corporations and all of that. Because she was the type of bank friendly politician who didn't need to be bribed because she was already on their side. That's the same problem.
Just the flip side of the coin. And then finally come layers. Most recently, we all know, went the route of, instead of, you know, leaning into the economic populism that Biden kindest tried to get off the ground a little bit. She ended up touring with Liz Cheney and billionaire mark Cuban. So. There's good reason to argue that establishment Democrats have been putting big money, overworking people [00:56:00] for a long time. It doesn't then follow that Republicans will be any better.
They're sure to be much worse, but the anger directed at Democrats. He does have a foundation. And then finally, I just want to think back to the 20, 20 race again, and the backroom deals that were made when Bernie Sanders was leading in that primary race. Bernie was winning the first few states before the whole field of candidates dropped out and backed Biden.
But Bernie was only winning a plurality of votes, not a majority of votes in most cases. And in that field, Bernie really was an outlier in terms of policies. So I do think it's fair to say that votes going to other candidates could sort of collectively be understood as. Someone other than Bernie. Votes right. So it definitely wasn't the overwhelming enthusiasm for Biden. They put him ahead that didn't really exist. It was primarily an uneasiness with Sanders, more aggressive and populist [00:57:00] approach that put people off and made them want to vote for someone else.
Now, I bring this up, not to argue that. It was right for Bernie to have lost. I wish he hadn't. But I want to highlight that it wasn't just the establishment politicians who were going against Bernie. And what I would argue, not understanding the shifting mood of the country that was making someone like Bernie much more appealing. To a broad base of voters. It was the democratic party, primary voters as well, who didn't understand that. Many of those voters personally, like the types of policies that Bernie Sanders puts forward, but have the impression that other people fear radical average voters out there in the world, wouldn't like them.
So. To them, they were making this calculation and it felt like too much of a risk to support someone like Sanders, but But what they missed in that calculation is just how widespread the favoribility is for Sanders style, democratic socialism policies that help people. A [00:58:00] politics that actually delivers. Now, arguably Biden did more than the progressive left expected in terms of trying to shift our economics away from the neoliberal status quo.
And I'm appreciative for that. But their messaging was terrible. And even if their messaging was great, there were too many other mistakes being made That helped drown out the good that was being done economically. So the Biden administration efforts ended up being too little, too late. And here we are with working people, continuing to be stuck between two parties that they don't believe will deliver for them. And I continue to argue, at least for now that the democratic party is still the entity that can be bent and molded in a new direction to get back to unwavering support for people while welcoming the hatred of the economic royalists as FDR described them. But the fight for the direction of the party must be happening now. And in the intervening years, Not just during the [00:59:00] next election cycles.
SECTION A: PARTY RECKONING
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics, section a party reckoning followed by section B meal, liberal stranglehold Section C crossed wires focusing on the reorganization of the Republican party. And section D solutions.
Why Elites Love Identity Politics Part 3 - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 1-1-25
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: So in order to be able to understand or analyze identity politics, you've got to first define it.
MELISSA NASCHEK: Yeah.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: You want to define identity politics in as neutral a way as possible so that you're not seen to be building into the definition your criticisms of it.
So we want a definition that most people can recognize as being legitimate. Now, how do most people understand identity politics? Well, I would say there's a couple of things that people associate with it. The first is a attention on discrimination as being at the essence of race domination.
Discrimination disparities. By disparities, we mean you look at any occupation, any phenomenon like housing, any phenomenon like medical [01:00:00] care, and you see, do blacks and whites and Latinos and whites get equal outcomes? And if they don't get equal outcomes, you say, well, there's a disparity within it.
Similarly with discrimination. You want to find out if people getting Equal access to goods, to services, to social outcomes, things like that. Disparities, discrimination, this is one element. And then the other element is what we would call representation. Do we see black and brown faces and presences in social institutions at a level, at a number that you would expect, given what their place in the population is?
So representation, disparities, these are probably what most people think of when they think of identity politics. Thank you. All right, so why would anybody criticize it? You criticize it because it's not so much that these things don't matter, it's that they are most important for, and most important to, elite sections of minority populations.
So take the issue, for example, of disparities. [01:01:00] All right, so you think that there's a problem of housing availability and home ownership in the middle class. Fewer blacks in own homes within the middle class than whites do within the middle class. Look at graduation rates. Fewer blacks graduate or Latinos graduate than whites do.
You look at corporate boardrooms. There are fewer black managers, women managers, than there are male managers or white managers. These are all examples of disparities. Why should anybody have a problem with that? Well, you don't, but the issue is, across a number of phenomena, it's not the disparities in jobs, or wages, or housing that matters, but the very availability of it.
So, take wages, for example. You might say the lower ends of the job market, say, if you're working at Walmart, blacks get lower wages than whites do. That's true. Now, If you solve that problem, will it take care of the quality of life and the life opportunities for [01:02:00] Black Americans or Latinos? If you move them from, say, 13 an hour to what whites are getting, which is 15 an hour, will it solve the problem?
Well, it makes it better. But it absolutely doesn't solve the problem. Why then the focus on these disparities, if it doesn't solve the problem, it's that they loom largest for the elite sections of the population. Because for the elite sections of the population, they've already achieved an appreciable standard of living.
What they want to get is the full value of their class position. Whereas for the lower rungs, for the working class, They're not trying to get the full value of their class position. Their problem is the class position itself. Solving the problem of disparities for people in the lower rungs of the job market doesn't solve their basic dilemmas because for them, the problem is the job itself.
The quality of the job itself, the availability of the jobs themselves. So simply attending to the distribution of people in housing. Let's take housing as an example. One criticism is blacks don't [01:03:00] get mortgages at the same rates that whites do. By the same rates I mean they don't get as many. And they don't get it at the same interest rate.
Well, that's fine if you have the income to afford a house. But for most of the working class, the issue isn't mortgages. What they need is cheap public housing. But you never see this enter the debate on racial justice. So if you agree, as most people do, that identity politics has to do with disparities and representation, then the problem with identity politics is not that it Doesn't touch the lives of minorities is that it touches the lives most powerfully of a tiny section of the minorities Which is their elite sections and to move beyond that deal with the quality of life the life chances of the vast majority of minorities And women now you have to go beyond disparities and look at the actual Availability of social goods not the distribution and not the sorting of different races into those social goods
MELISSA NASCHEK: I think you're right that a big problem [01:04:00] In any discussion of identity politics, whether it's critical or otherwise, is that there are all these different meanings floating around.
So one recent interview I heard was saying that when people criticize identity politics, really what they're saying is, we don't support Black Lives Matter, we don't support pay equity for women, issues like that. And I think what you're outlining is that identity politics is not just I'm critical of this.
I'm critical of that campaign. It's a completely unique outlook on how to build political coalitions and how to understand the interests of racial and gender groups.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: Yeah. So people on the left, socialists or Marxists. When they criticize identity politics, what are they criticizing? They can't possibly be criticizing the pursuit of racial justice since socialists have led the way on the pursuit of racial [01:05:00] justice for a hundred years and similarly on gender lines.
They can't be saying we should set aside matters of race. Then what are they saying? What they're saying is that Under the banner of race justice, identitarians pursue it in a way that leaves the interests and the experiences of the vast majority of people of color out of the political strategy, similarly with women.
So I think then that once we've defined it in this way, it makes it possible for us to analyze it in terms of where it comes from, why it's so popular, etc., etc. And I think that's what we ought to be pursuing next.
Democratic Dealignment w Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Part 2 - The Dig - Air Date 11-9-24
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: Little study groups and sex, which some people I think really, actually, kind of perversely yearn to return to the comfort of. Because being in mass politics and organizing, say, you know, tenants in a building, Some of whom are Trump voters and you need every single person on board. That is what a tenant union looks like.
That is what a labor union looks like. [01:06:00] That's what
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: the working class movement. Yes.
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: That's what the working class looks like. Yeah. And, and, and there really is, there is a certain type of identity politics that really does play into the right hands. And this is something that mainstream analysts, we were passing this absurd New York Times article.
Uh, we were discussing that ahead of the election that mainstream analysts have really glommed onto, but they've done so in a really. Really confused and confusing way because in fact the the upshot isn't selling out racial justice or trans people It's building a big movement that tells a cohesive compelling story about what's going on in this country and how to fix it and that invites everybody in
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: that has Solidarity at its core and the the old Knights of Labor Slogan that an injury to one is an injury to all And really explicating, uh, what that looks like and what that means.
And we were onto something with that in 2020. And that is part of the reason why the [01:07:00] backlash was so fierce. Um, I wrote about how Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin, Said in 2022, when the Republicans were washed out, uh, in the midterm elections, that this is because of the multicultural curriculums and schools that, you know, if we don't change or address this, that The Republicans will never win, uh, another election.
And part of that was also not just critical race theory, not just that, but a reaction to young white people marching militantly in the streets against racism. And so that was, A critical opportunity to not just come out of 2020 having dumped Trump, but really building a vehicle that could grow. And instead, [01:08:00] all of that energy got diverted into getting Joe Biden elected, then got diverted again into the Georgia Senate races, uh, in, in, in January and then was demobilized really.
And so. If you think about it, Joe Biden, even as he was backing away from his promises, doing the bidding of, uh, uh, Republicans and deconstructing the emergency COVID state, faced no resistance, faced no opposition, the only hint of opposition and resistance to Joe Biden. Joe Biden came, uh, last spring with the eruption of the Palestinian solidarity protest, because it was the one issue that could not be co opted into the Democratic Party in ways that Black Lives Matter could, in ways that the immigrant rights movement could, in ways that certainly the LGBT [01:09:00] movement could.
And so, This is part of the problem, the demobilization. And so here we are faced with renewed, uh, political, uh, attacks, still lacking those vehicles to respond in a mass way, it doesn't mean that people won't respond and that we can't respond because people inevitably will when Trump tries to initiate deportations and all of the horrible things that he has promised to do.
But the left, we have big problems. The fracturing of the left, the lack of political vehicles, the entanglement with the democratic party, which meant that. You know, it's not like the Joe Biden just pushed a button and, Ooh, the left is demobilized. It's also about [01:10:00] how groups who believe that access within the democratic party gives them the air of officials in the democratic party, uh, and perhaps that is the most effective way to get change.
So. These are parts of, of political debates that need to, to happen, strategic debates, tactical debates about what it is that we should be doing and how it is that we build ourselves out, uh, of the current, uh, crisis that we're in right now.
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: And I think we need to have those debates. in, if possible, a comradely fashion, and that really assesses the conjuncture and possible paths forward strategically rather than moralistically.
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Absolutely. Which probably means not on Twitter. Well, but that, I mean, I think that that is actually a big thing. Like, how do we Build our way out of this, are we going to do it on these online platforms? Can we get in [01:11:00] rooms together? Can we talk to each other? And some of it, it sounds like, what are you talking about?
This, this sounds so, is it touchy feely? I don't know, but there, there is a culture problem. And the left, the, the hostility, the intolerance, which I think has conclusively been proven, uh, to be a feature of online engagement. And so, something has to change, because there's just, there's not just going to be cycles of, Well, this is just like 2016, 2017.
Trump comes in, there's going to be a resistance and then we resist and resist and resist and have a confrontation and then funnel all of our resources to get, you know, Josh Shapiro, uh, elected as president. This is, it's not happening because the democratic party's core constituencies are breaking off, are falling out.
And so. [01:12:00] There's a real question about what can be done, what is to be done, what we can do that have to be seriously addressed. This is, there's this idea, I think, from liberals that, oh, this has happened before, we confronted this before, let's have a women's march. You know, in, in January and things are worse, things are materially worse for people.
I think that the Trump administration is not going to be surprised. They were just as surprised as everyone else when they won in 2016. Stephen Miller has been planning since 2020 about how to get back to the White House and get every Spanish speaking person in this country deported. So that Project 2025 is unfortunately a real thing.
Like they have a plan of governance. It doesn't mean that they can [01:13:00] go in and just hit a button and execute the entire thing, but, but they, this is not the surprise, Oh my God, we have power. This is, yes, we're returning to power. Yeah, we have plans
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: and they're no kind of old school establishment Republicans or deep state figures who are going to be in the room to mess it up for him.
They've got a they've got a team that's ready to go.
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: They have the government. They have all the chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court. This is not 2016.
Democrats Bungled The 2024 Election WAY Worse Than We Thought Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 1-8-25
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: one of the myths that are going around is one that it was an, a, an immigration question because There's no evidence. That immigration drove more votes to Donald Trump because he got essentially the same share of the electorate as he did in 2021.
Excuse me, 2020. And I also want to say the same thing for the culture war against, wage against, uh, trans people. There is no, [01:14:00] uh, suggesting the idea that, uh, people were enraged about trans. Are Trump voters? Upset about trans people? Yes, that's their, uh, that's their, um, aggrievement du jour. But that didn't, that didn't create any new voters for Trump.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right. In 2022, the Republicans without Trump at the top of the ticket were, like, did not do well running on transphobia as one of their central planks. Absolutely
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: not. And I just want to go over this AP. I mentioned this yesterday, but this is very important to understand because the people out there who are talking about, like, we have some type of social contagion, the people who are talking about like, you know, uh, trans rights are overcoming everything.
And, you know, you can't send your kid to school without, you know, coming out, uh, trans AP, uh, reports that, uh, JAMA, the, uh, Journal of, uh, American, uh, Medical Association, [01:15:00] Pediatrics, has um, done a study to try and assess how many children, patients, ages eight to 17, received gender affirming care. The data ranges from 2018 to 2022, five years.
2022 is the last year I think that they could get the full data as they were doing this study. Only 926 adolescents with a gender related diagnosis received puberty blockers over that five year period. Not nine, not nine thousand, not, not nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and twenty six. That's less than two kids, uh, excuse me, twenty kids per state over a five year period.[01:16:00]
Also during that time. About double that, almost 2, 000 received hormones. Again, this is from ages 8 to 17. This is over a five year period. The research has found that no patients under the age of 12 were prescribed to hormones. So only, uh, kids 12 to 18, 2, 000 of them over the course of five years. The study did not look at surgeries.
Other researchers have found those procedures are extremely rare. That's relative to the incredibly rare amount of, uh, kids who are actually getting gender affirming care in medications. And what that, uh, suggests, if it's not explicit, is that there are safeguards, that this isn't being done willy nilly.
Um, you know, that Johnny's
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: [01:17:00] not going to school and coming back jail or whatever, like Donald Trump has been saying. It's not a new
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: industry. Yeah, they're just sending kids to kindergarten. But even the people who supposedly are like, uh, listen, I'm for trans rights, but, um, But? I'm just concerned that we are, uh, castrating, uh, you know, the children and we are ruining children's lives willy nilly.
We are not. Despite the actual data. You can tell me that, uh, there's one whistleblower who ends up being considered a freak by everybody who, uh, came in, uh, touch with her at a hospital, causing bomb threats everywhere, saying that the procedures, uh, were, were too lax, but the actual data tells a completely different story.
Yep. This, and not to mention the studies that show that the people receive this care almost overwhelmingly, well, no, overwhelmingly, but almost totally. Um, we're happy they engaged in this care, and you can't find any medical procedure [01:18:00] or any frankly psychological treatment.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And this doesn't have any
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: better rate of less regret.
So, I mean, this is really important stuff to understand.
EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right. And this is very similar data to the one that, uh, Joe Rogan pulled up some years ago, uh, I guess it was just two years ago at this point, when Matt Walsh came on to promote this documentary, where he was saying that there were millions of children in this country undergoing, um, trans affirming care, and this is somebody who supposedly toiled over this data and did a whole documentary about it.
When you see the reality of these numbers, just Just be clear, like, these are not people operating in good faith, they're smear merchants directing hatred towards people because they can't deliver on their politics for a majority of Americans. And when you engage,
SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: when you engage in this culture war, all you're doing, all you're doing, you're not helping children, you're not protecting children, all you're doing is, [01:19:00] uh, creating more hate, you're creating more suffering, you're helping, uh, right wingers, and, um, you're perpetrating lies an aggrieve and just demonizing the next, um, uh, you know, cohort du jour that's going to be demonized by the right.
That's all you're doing.
SECTION B: NEOLIBERAL STRANGLEHOLD
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B neoliberal, stranglehold.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (with Gary Gerstle) Part 2 - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 1-14-25
Nick Hanauer: Gary, our focus is usually on the economics, on the academic economics, and you’re obviously taking a historical view. How does, do these two things relate? And were there historical drivers that led naturally to the neoclassical economic framework from which neoliberalism was derived? I guess the way we think about it is that you have got this layer, if you will, of neoclassical [01:20:00] economics, which is based on a bunch of underlying, theoretically empirical, scientifically verified assumptions about human behavior, about the dynamics of human social systems, about the origins and nature of prosperity, so on and so forth. And from that you derive neoliberalism, which is its ideological companion, right? The sort of social, cultural, political and moral framework from which we allow to govern ourselves. How does the academic layer, economic academic layer relate to the ideology? Which came first, for example? It’s sort of a chicken and egg problem a little bit, isn’t it?
GARY GERSTLE: You mean the other dimension referring to the cultural dimension, this dream of freedom? Is that-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
GARY GERSTLE: I think they both arose at the same moment. If the new left moment is the 1960s and ’70s, I would say the cultural component came first from [01:21:00] university students, many of them privileged, growing up in what they took to be a massively bureaucratized society that did not deliver on the promise of individuality and freedom that they had been led to expect would be part of their American birthright. This yearning for personal freedom was there in the ’60s during a moment of great affluence. But then you have the economic crisis of the 1970s, and that economic crisis is profound in terms of eliminating the dominance of a different system of economics, Keynesian economics, that have been integral to the new deal order. There are two sources of crises in the 1970s which upend the New Deal and Keynesianism, one is that America has serious industrial competitors in the world for the first time since prior to the Second World War. After World War II, the U.S. is the only [01:22:00] industrial economy still standing, and the world is its oyster.
It can do whatever it wants to in the world, or I should say in the non-communist world. One of the things it does is that it builds up the competitors it had defeated, Germany and Japan. And it needs to do this because it can’t sell enough goods to international consumers unless those consumers are out there. And in the 1970s, Japanese cars and electronics and German machinery and cameras and other things, they have become serious competitors to the United States. And the U.S. industry is not ready for it because they’ve had a 30-year period of control and oligopoly behavior where two or three firms which control entire industries. And over the long term, that’s not a good recipe for economic growth and prosperity because you dull innovation, the imperative of productivity. The other thing that [01:23:00] happens in the 1970s is a reordering of relations between consumers of resources in the global north and the suppliers of those resources in the global south.
And here, the critical event is the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which leads Saudi Arabia to boycott, refuse to sell its oil to the West. And the West’s prosperity had been built on the promise of unending supplies of cheap oil from the Middle East, which were still at that time under the control of Anglo-American oil companies and they made the decisions how much oil to extract from the ground and what price to charge. That ends in 1973 with the rise of OPEC and the determination that these resources belong to the producers and we are going to set the terms. That is part of a larger reconfiguration of relations between the global north and global south that makes the 1970s a [01:24:00] double whammy. Competition for the U.S. from industrial competitors and need to radically rethink the availability and cost of vital resources to prosperity. And that plunges the American economy into a very severe crisis.
It’s not just inflation, it’s the beginnings of massive deindustrialization of economic centers of the north and the Keynesian toolkit is no longer working. I have a idea, a theory of what I call political orders. And when a political order establishes itself, it is able to compel agreement from all parts of the relevant political spectrum. During the heyday of the New Deal order, the Keynesian tools were thought to be so powerful and so effective that when Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes the first Republican president to regain the presidency in 1952, the big question is he going to roll back the New Deal or is he going to endorse its core features? And he endorses its core features [01:25:00] because he feels there is no future for the GOP if he doesn’t do that. Well, that consensus explodes in the 1970s and these neoliberal ideas, versions of the neoclassical ideas that you talked about, which have been around and which had been incubating but had been utterly irrelevant to the conduct of American politics or of the American economy.
This is their moment when they can bid for power. They had a strategy for gaining power. They had think tanks. They were developing links between think tanks and politicians. They had a general who could command the field forces. Ronald Reagan was his name. They were ready for the opportunity that the 1970s gave them. In my theory of political orders, there are certain economic crises of such magnitude that they crack up the orthodoxy that have been dominant and allow ideas that have been considered till that [01:26:00] moment dangerously heterodox to enter the mainstream. This becomes the neoliberal moment of ascent.
Workers Without a Party Part 2 - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 12-11-24
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: Here's the way I would put it is that with the white working class, they were overly confident that that class has nowhere else to go.
And whatever white workers they lose, they can make up by bringing in what they call the minority vote. Right. By which they meant Blacks and Latinos, okay? Yeah. So how do you bring in the minority vote? Now this is interesting. All these people are white. The people, these political leaders. So they have to figure out, well, what do the minorities want?
And they turn to not Black or Latino. Union leaders, Latino community organizers, Latino working class people, they turn to those sections of the minority population who, A, they trust, and B, more importantly, who won't, uh, roil their overall program, which is a corporate based program. So when they say, okay, we're gonna compensate by bringing in more minority voters, [01:27:00] What they, who they turn to is elites within the minority population.
Now that means, if you, if you think that minority populations are just a homogenous blob, then of course you can just pick up anybody at random and say, Hey, what do you people want? Right. Okay. But if you, if they are, in fact, economically stratified if they have classes and therefore different interests.
It's going to matter who you're asking as to what would please black and Latino voters enough that they would come to the party. Yeah. Okay. So who do they ask? Well, they ask Black professionals, Latino professionals, the non profit sector, and the corporate class, right? Yeah. What is the instinctive worldview of those classes?
It is not going to be to say, you should provide jobs, hospitals, education, and housing to these folks. Yeah. Because they are themselves economically dominant in those classes. And if they're the professionals, they don't, they don't care. They care about their own lives, which is, [01:28:00] a life in which economic issues don't figure prominently, but the cultural slights do, the symbolism does, and that's what you said that you're trying to substitute cultural gifts for material ones.
Well, what's the material basis for that? Why? Because it's not rocket science, right? So it's because the minority advisors who they turn to, are themselves of the same class as the white suburbanites, who they're trying to woo in their new electoral strategy. And the result is, they not only leave the white working class behind, they leave the black and Latino working class behind too, and you are now reaping the fruits.
of that strategy. Now, of course, numerically, Blacks still preponderantly vote for the Democrats. The Latino vote is close to evenly split. It would be folly to ignore the fact that the shift within those populations is at a historic high towards the Republicans, and it's especially concentrated In the working class, and that's a huge dilemma for the Democrats now,
MELISSA NASCHEK: right?
And I think your [01:29:00] emphasis on economic stratification with those groups is so important, because the way that most post election analysis is done is they just treat, you know, they treat them exactly like we're criticizing. The Democrats for treating him, which is these homogenous blobs.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: Yeah, they'll say, you know, you're listening to an American commentator when they use the following expression.
Such and such policies hurt the poor and people of color. So people, people of color does not include classes within it, right? They're just assumed to be economically homogenous and. I should say this is an actively constructed trope by elites of color. Yeah. This notion that there are no classes amongst black Americans, there are no classes amongst Latinos is something that's been created by minority academics, upwardly mobile professionals, and the business community.
The only people who ever denied the existence of classes are the people on top.
MELISSA NASCHEK: Right. And I think as the Democrats are [01:30:00] trying to reckon with and understand what happened to Their so called demographic destiny, where racial minorities were going to just keep putting them in office in perpetuity. The right is also trying to craft a public narrative and explain their recent victory, which was unexpected, specifically in the, in this racial dimension.
And it's interesting listening to right wing commentators because they're also giving a lot of credit to culture and saying that. A big part of the reason that these voters are coming towards the Republican Party is because the Democrats don't represent their values anymore. So you know, I've been thinking about how we can respond, not just to the Democrats, [01:31:00] Narrative, but also the Republican narrative because I think it's equally important to explain why this dynamic is happening and explain why both sides aren't offering a real analysis of these dynamics,
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: you know, the Republicans are advantaged by a couple of things.
And those are not deep advantages. One advantage in this election was that it was in substantial measure, the election itself, So, it's hard to imagine Kamala Harris winning this election, given the economic trends of the last four years. And you see anti incumbency being really powerful across the electoral universe right now, around the world.
MELISSA NASCHEK: Right.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: So, odds are, she was going to lose no matter what. But on, in the longer term. What's been happening is that the Republicans have a second advantage, which is that not only the Democrats not delivered anything to the [01:32:00] working class, but when it comes to the way they relate, the way they present themselves to the poor, it's one of two ways, right?
If it's white workers, There's a substantial amount of derision and open condescension towards them. Right? Right. That you have to rid yourself. I saw this ad, I remember, it was on somewhere in, on YouTube or something, where essentially it was saying to people, You have an opportunity, a historic opportunity, to elect the first Black female president and I thought so the way you approach the electorate is not by telling them what you can do for them But what they can do for you, right and it encapsulated perfectly The way that the Democrats have reacted to their defeats of the past two or three electoral cycles, which is when you lose elections, you blame the electorate.
This is, this is really amazing, which is you tell them that they had a chance to step up to the plate and do something good and they failed you. [01:33:00] That encapsulates for the working class, especially the white working class, an incredible condescension, right? And then when you see the intelligentsia, if you look at MSNBC, if you look at CNN, all the, the, the major networks, when they talk about, The poor, how do they talk about them?
The poor are riven with these cultural deficiencies. They're racist, they're misogynist, they're imperialist, blah, blah, blah. Now, how do you expect them to react? On the one hand, you're not giving them anything. And on the other hand, while you're not giving them anything, you tell them they deserve nothing, right?
Because they're morally inferior. Now, when it comes to the minorities, then, you're not giving them very much, except quite literally, some letters. So you turn Latino into Latinx and you think that's going to win over, it's going to bring voters to you. So obviously, when the language you're speaking is the language of highly credentialed, overly educated, poorly socialized academics or professionals.
All the while doing nothing [01:34:00] for people's material lives. It's a, it's a very, one might say, toxic package, right? Yeah. That there's no sense in which they can connect to you. Now, you'd ask, how does the left react to that? The only way you react to that is, of course, first of all, more than anything else, you actually have to show that the party will fight for you.
It'll actually fight for you and do something for you. Right. But while it's doing that, your activists, your politicians, your candidates, they have to speak to them in normal, everyday language, not like they're coming out of some identitarian boot camp. Neither of those things is happening. So I think until people who call themselves leftists do away with the condescension and the derision and understand that material needs are not something that's gauche or vulgar but real, you won't get anything out of it.
SECTION C: CROSSED WIRES
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next section C crossed wires with a focus on some of the potential changes happening within the Republican party.
Democratic Dealignment w Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Part 3 - The Dig - Air Date 11-9-24
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: I want to ask you about a major, uh, An increasingly weird [01:35:00] ideological challenge. I think we face exemplified by the role of Elon Musk on the Trumpist far right. And I think, I think it's important, including in terms of multiracial working class dealignment, because in the absence of a left populist alternative, what we're seeing, I think, is neoliberalism remaking So many people into wannabe entrepreneurs aspiring to make money from crypto or landlord ism any sort of escape from wage labor health through through hustling hard, achieving the new American dream of passive income.
What? What do you?
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: That's that's what Harris was offering, right?
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: Yeah. So
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: crypto and weed.
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: Yeah, that was to black men.
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah.
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: What do you? Ridiculous. What do you make of this? This fierce attachment, uh, this fierce attachment to these avatars of American capitalism at the very moment when people feel more crushed by American capitalism than ever.
And what kind of, like, model for being in the world [01:36:00] Are we putting forward as an alternative?
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: It feels like, it feels like the only way out, man. I will tell you one of the first demonstrations I went to when I moved to Chicago in the late 90s, early aughts. It was, um, Jesse Jackson organized this protest.
There was a public school that was across the street from a brand new juvenile, uh, jail that was huge. White, it looked, it mirrored building, it took up, I think, two or three city blocks, and it towered over everything. And so he had called this protest at an elementary school, um, because they only had one functioning toilet.
And so they would, the teachers in the building, would organize the students on the second [01:37:00] floor to make a trip down to the basement to use the bathroom once or twice a day. And so Jackson was drawing attention to the obvious contradiction of this multi million dollar facility. To jail black kids and this public school that had one functioning toilet in the basement.
And so why is basketball, boxing, MMA, wrapping? Why is all this pop? It's a way out. It's a way out. When. Nothing else seems to work in which you can't plausibly imagine anything working. If you go into your average working class black neighborhood school, there is no way in most of these schools that you walk in with any [01:38:00] expectation that you can walk out and be set on the path to success.
To having the kind of quality of life for you, for your family. No one thinks that. The jobs that are available to young black people just like the jobs that are available to young working class, rural, poor white people offer you no future, no hope. We wonder why there are deaths by despair, whether they are black people in despair or white people.
In despair, it's because we live in a society where there is no hope and it's true. It is absolutely true. People are bonded to debt with no job that can pay that debt. So it means a lifetime of shitty work that you don't want to do [01:39:00] that is meaningless. And that is the future that they have made for us.
So much so that Kamala Harris talked about for five minutes. A 5 percent rent cap until she realized that actually you can't guarantee something like that, right? Especially if you want to surround yourself with the Mark Cubans of the world, with the nice billionaires, the liberal billionaires, like they don't want to be hearing about rent caps.
And so we live in a society that guarantees you. The right to a job, can't pay your bills, to a place to live, that the rise in rent is unchecked, that a landlord can charge you anything he determines you're able to pay, that sees an increase in evictions, that [01:40:00] underfunds every aspect of its public sector.
And then we wonder why you want to be a rapper. You want to be a basketball player. You want to be Elon Musk. Who the hell doesn't want to be a billionaire when that is your social reality? And so clearly the way that you transform that is that people have to have hope that their lives can be different.
And hope is not a cheap religiosity that some divine intervention can change this. It's a union job. It's more than a living wage. It is capped rent, right? It's rent. That's 20% of your income. It's parks, it's libraries, it's healthcare. It's free college, not student loans, free college. It's transportation, it's vacation.
It's like peace of mind. It's quiet. It's connection. It's [01:41:00] friendships. It's relationships. That is what supplants. The stupidity of the kind of vapid, venal, billionaire psychosis with, you know, Trump and his gold sneakers, Elon Musk and his rocket phallus. You know, like, these are cartoon figures, but that they are animated through the hopelessness of the society as the way that it is.
And we know this. We know this as a society. That's why people have the polls with the huge majorities who want to use our public resources to make people's lives better. Like, ordinary people recognize this. If you, if you have a good life, you know, like, that is the secret to a long and meaningful life.
But that's hard to achieve in this society. for listening. That's hard to achieve in a society that [01:42:00] promises you absolutely nothing except the right or capacity to find a job that is utterly meaningless and that can't afford you or your family members a decent quality of life. And, you know, that's, I mean, that, that's what this struggle, uh, is about is, is how to have a good life and not a life of debt and meaningless work.
Strategist says young men feel rejected by the Democratic Party - MSNBC - Air Date 11-16-24
symone Sanders-Townsend - Host, MSNBC: Well, I heard from some of the, you know, the, the, the very fancy political streets that bro culture was actually like taking the term bro culture was, is, is, is to young men that Latin X is to the Hispanic and Latino community. I just want to throw down the table. Is that true? Like the bro culture, is it a backlash?
Let's talk about bro culture.
TERRANCE WOODBURY: I mean, look, I, I, I certainly don't feel like I'm a part of a bro culture, but there is a, there is a manosphere, right? There's a manosphere where, where these conversations are happening, where there, there [01:43:00] are conversations that are not happening in mainstream media, uh, conversations about masculinity, about how masculinity is evolving.
I get these, these texts from my dad and, and what's at groups all the time about how what we are eating is reducing masculinity. I'm like, dad, I promise it's not because I ate avocados , but, but that, right? So, so there is an environment. Um, where conversations are happening that Democrats are going to have to penetrate.
But when we get there, we're going to have to have a different conversation. And some of these conversations are complicated, right? This is what we talk about. We're claiming values like masculinity and spirituality. What does masculinity look like in a Democratic Party? Right. What is the role of masculinity?
It's not all toxic, but
MSNBC HOST: it's not. See, that's the problem. So I think you just jumped onto a false narrative. It's not about what masculinity is in a political party. It's what's masculinity in our culture and society. That's right. What does it mean for a young man to grow into a father to grow into a productive member of our community?
So this whole bro culture [01:44:00] bs It's a psychological warp game with young men telling them that they got to, you know, have a particular attitude about women. They got to look at, they got to look at situations, um, you know, through this lens where, you know, Josh Holly and others, Hey, we're going to shine some light on our groin and we're going to become more men.
What, what the hell are we talking about here? I found interesting
AARON SMITH: in our research is we asked young men, what does it mean to be a man? Number one thing was protecting your family. Number two thing was honesty. So this is a complicated group. There's 25 million young men. I wouldn't put them all in a box.
So they just
MSNBC HOST: voted for someone who is, in terms of protecting the family, is going to break up families. And in terms of being honest, hello, we're talking about Donald Trump here.
AARON SMITH: That's my point. There are young men who voted for Kamala Harris, who have concerns about feminism. And there are young men who voted for Donald Trump, who support abortion rights.
This is this true [01:45:00] swing group. You know, 7 million of them voted for Joe Biden in 2020. They can go back, but we have to We have to speak to them and realize that they're not fitting into these boxes that we're used to.
MSNBC 2: So after the election, you had a briefing, Young Men's Research Initiative, and your researcher said two things that I've been thinking about a lot.
One is that people say like, well, who listens to three hours of Joe Rogan? People who stock groceries, people who drive trucks, like it becomes a parasocial relationship. But also this idea that Democrats are so focused on the policy and the messaging and that is one piece of things and that is for the party to contend with.
But what your researcher said is, so long as whatever that policy and whatever that message is, is being filtered through the kaleidoscope of the media that folks are consuming, not just young men, right, just this powerful media force. They will find a way to say, well, doesn't that message from Democrats isn't for you, that policy from Democrats isn't for you.
So there's also from an infrastructure perspective in the progressive space, someone has to deal with the kaleidoscope [01:46:00] either by penetrating the kaleidoscope or by saying, here's some alternate forms of media where, yeah, we, it's fun and it's entertaining. And we talk about culture and we don't jam the vegetables into your mouth.
We understand you're a full person with a full life, and we can talk to you that way. Look, there goes the
AARON SMITH: avocado. Let's talk about, let's talk about the investment problem. It's a fruit. If you, if you go to the Democratic Party's website right now, they have a web, a page on who we serve. And it lists 16 different groups.
It says women, seniors, rural Americans. One group that's not mentioned is men. And I don't think that Democratic leaders are saying we are not for men. But the message is, is getting across. If you look at Dollar spent. Donald Trump in this campaign outspent Dems 4 to 1 in terms of online ads targeting young men, 10 to 1 in swing states.
So there's clearly an investment problem, and then we need to start thinking about these distribution channels. How do we actually get through the kaleidoscope and get those [01:47:00] messages that we want to be heard? to young men.
TERRANCE WOODBURY: A part of my concern, though, is not just that the Democratic, what you describe as like the Democratic message is not for these men, it's that far too often it feels like Democrats are saying those men are not for us, right?
If they don't, the partisan, the progressive puritanism, right? I tell people all the time in my household, my father is the head of household and my mother agreed with that, right? That there's that in a culture that has raised men to believe that men are head of household when they have questions about a woman as president.
It doesn't mean that they're no longer our voter. It means we have to engage them in a tough conversation about why, why, why the role, why gender roles are evolving, why our country is evolving. It's the same thing Barack Obama did in 2000 and eight. He didn't tell every white person that had bias. You're not my voter.
He engaged them in a conversation about how his grandmother, the person he loved the most, held bias to. And that's what Democrats are not doing. We are rejecting these men who have, who have opinions that are different than us, [01:48:00] who have, who don't hold our, our progressive puritanism and we're telling them that they're no longer our voter.
We don't want you here if you don't leave with your pronouns. We don't want you here. If you don't, uh, believe that a woman should be president, as opposed to our country is evolving, there's a role for you in it, and this is what it's going to look like.
AARON SMITH: One other thing that Obama did,
symone Sanders-Townsend - Host, MSNBC: was he showed
AARON SMITH: up everywhere.
I remember seeing Obama at world wrestling events, and he would talk to anyone, and he had that approach. The other thing is, I think we need to do a better job of listening. to what is going on online and what young men are saying. This is a rapidly changing landscape. The world in 2026 or 2028 could look very different.
And the first time voters there in high school right now. So we need to be prepared. It's not just the battle we're fighting right now. It's It's keeping our eye on what's going on so we understand what's coming.
symone Sanders-Townsend - Host, MSNBC: I think this head of household, um, uh, piece that you hit on and, and, and you and Aaron are dovetailing.
I, I really think that there is something there. [01:49:00] Y'all remember the weekend before the election, Wes, Governor Moore of Maryland came on our show and he talked about, you know, men need to stand up for their households, he said, and that is how he put it. Um, and He framed it as, you know, as a man, if you're the head of your household, like these are the things, you know, that I'm talking to men about in this election and what I've heard is that, um, some, some voters have felt that maybe the language that was used to speak about, um, men and, and, uh, in this election was a little condescending.
It's like, let's talk to the men. Um, and, and, and maybe we all need to rethink it. But I really think that when I talk to folks and they're like, oh, well, people just didn't want to vote for a woman. What you're saying is right, Terrence. In a culture where men have been young, young men and boys are raised to be the head of their household and they're saying, well, I don't know if a woman can be president.
We can't write that off. We need to engage it. It is painful though, because it's just like your mama raised you, but you, you don't think she, your mama been telling you what to do your whole life, but now you don't want, you don't want a woman running the country. It's painful, but you [01:50:00] got to have those conversations is what I'm hearing.
TERRANCE WOODBURY: That's right. And these are going to be painful conversations, but there's a way to get to, to hold our progressive values, right? Hold our progressive values and, and, and, and message them through these types of these types of lenses. Look, as the head of my household, it is incumbent upon me to protect my family from a government that tells a, that tells my wife or daughter, Who they can and cannot be.
If God grants everyone freedom of choice, then why should government grant my daughter any less than that? That is a different lens, that's a religious lens, a masculine lens for the exact same progressive values. We can do both.
How Democrats Can Win Back The Working Class Part 2 - Lever Time - Air Date 11-8-24
DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, uh, I absolutely agree. The idea of a smarter authoritarian whose personal behavior doesn't get in the way of implementing the authoritarian agenda, that is J. D. Vance. And his code switch, uh, in the debate to sort of normal guy. I think that, I mean, my take on Vance is it took him a very long time on the campaign trail to realize that he would be [01:51:00] more effective by code switching to normal guy rather than like MAGA base guy.
It was really weird, actually, because he was already the VP nominee, meaning he wasn't in a primary. And yet he was sort of running in the general as a as a primary presidential candidate appealing mostly to the base Something in his brain Switched or he got a good piece of advice. Hey, wait a minute I'm already in the general election.
I'm going to use this debate to code switch to like general election, normal guy. And it was really effective. And I think the answer is, and I say this not loving the answer because I don't want my kids to go to school and in a school that feels unsafe or where there are visible signs of security. But I unfortunately think that we have to increase security.
In our schools, we have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the door stronger. We've got to make the windows stronger. And of course, we've got to increase school resource officers because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the [01:52:00] hands of bad guys, it just doesn't fit with recent experience.
So we've got to make our schools safer. And I think we've got to have some common sense, bipartisan solutions for how to do that. Vance is just as, if not more, Dangerous than Trump because he, he comes off as a relatively normal person.
JEFF WEAVER: And I think he has an ideological foundation. You know, Trump doesn't really have an ideological foundation.
I mean, he's authoritarian. He jumps all over the place. It's not a coherent ideology that underpins his policies, but for the Vance, the risk
DAVID SIROTA: Vance. Vance has a way he sees the world. He's got a narrative that he tells. I mean, I just saw him, I saw a clip of him on Rogan, by the way, uh, talking about how the railroad companies hate him, uh, because he's the one who's called them out for socializing the costs of their misbehavior.
So I talked about this train disaster in East Palestine and, you know, the railroad companies hate me because I kind of went on a crusade against them afterwards. And what I realized is, think [01:53:00] of all the costs. of that disaster. Think of the healthcare costs, the welfare costs from people who lost their jobs, the declining home values in that community, just all of the costs absorbed by that community.
And the railroads are paying slap on the hand fines. And it sort of occurred to me that the reason they're not more serious about these train disasters is because they're privatizing the rewards, but when a major train disaster who picks up the tab. It's the local residents and it's the American taxpayer.
And that's something that fundamentally has to change. I listened to it and I was like Okay, this guy has a real analysis of the world, and I think that that raises another question. This realignment, if there is a realignment, there certainly was a realignment in the election. If this realignment is happening, are there opportunities for actual good populist policy to happen?
Under [01:54:00] a Trump Vance administration. And are you even allowed to say that there are possibilities for good things to happen, uh, without fear of being called like a Trump appeaser or a Trump supporter or, right, right. Like, like, like, like, are we allowed to even talk about this?
JEFF WEAVER: Right, right. Well, look, I, look, I do, I do think people want more, uh, honest talk.
Or what they perceive as honest talk and less sort of partisan talking points. Uh, so I mean, you know, let's be completely honest about it, you know, when COVID, uh, happened and places were being shut down, you know, it was Trump signed the PPP. It was Trump that signed off on the initial round of checks to people to keep them afloat during the, you know, Biden continued it wisely.
Um, but that certainly didn't happen in the 2000 and. Nine time period. Uh, those checks weren't going out to people. So, uh, you know, so there were, you know, like there were good things that happened. [01:55:00] Um, and you know, there are people on the, uh, among Democrats and Democrats worked on the PPP as well. I've been card and other people worked on that as well.
You know, Bernie was certainly out there pounding the table for a more direct payment relief to people. So, um, You know, are there ways where, where, where you, where you can do that? I mean, you know, the problem is, is that much of Trump's populism is a fae populism, right? Right. Uh, so when you get to tax policy and you get to deregulatory policy in some areas, you know, it's gonna be a complete corporate giveaway.
It's gonna be the reinforcing of the, of the corporate, uh, benefits.
DAVID SIROTA: C can we go back to the election for, for one more moment on that? Yeah, sure. The, the, the Latino vote, I mean, the Latino vote was in. A particularly big shift. And I think there are a lot of people who may be listening to this saying, I don't understand how the Latino vote shifted to Donald Trump when he ran all of these immigration ads [01:56:00] that That were in a lot of ways code for, uh, we don't like Latinos.
I mean, I, I, I, I think there's a, there's like a border argument on, on the, the policy of immigration. And then I think there's also, uh, you know, uh, at a deeper level, Donald Trump coding a kind of. Anti Latino or pro white message to white people by talking about border policy, right? It's, it's sort of dog whistle.
So I think a lot of people will look at the election results and be like, I don't understand. Donald Trump is like dog whistling anti Latino messages to white people. And he's rewarded by having an upsurge in voter turnout. Latino voters voting for him. What do you make of that?
JEFF WEAVER: You know, we had tremendous success in bernie's two campaigns really with latino voters I mean far beyond what anybody thought was possible.
I mean california in a fractured field You remember there was three [01:57:00] million candidates on the ballot california bernie got 50 percent of latino vote in california. So um You know, the Latino community itself is wildly fractured. So, you know, Central Americans and Mexicans on one hand versus Venezuelans and Cubans, you know, they're very, very different communities.
So let's talk a little bit about, um, Latino community in a sort of the Southwest part of the United States of sort of largely Central American and, um, uh, and Mexican, uh, uh, descent. You know, there were some, I did notice during the campaign, there were some subtle, you know, Changes in Trump's rhetoric at times where he started there was I remember one in particular he said well It's not really it's not just Latinos coming over as people from other places coming over people coming over from the Middle East people coming over from Africa and you know trying to I think it's some small way split some hairs Look Latinos like every generation of immigrant communities It's highly aspirational and if you could speak to those aspirations Transcriptions You will [01:58:00] get their support and that's what he did.
He spoke to their aspirations. Now, who's going to follow through on it? Probably not. Bernie spoke to their aspirations and, you know, it was also rewarded electorally. Um, the, the Democrats didn't have anything to say other than high prices. Um, and I think that's why they failed. You know, housing, housing's a mess, you know, the cost of housings.
Apartments are expensive. Houses are expensive. The interest rates are crazy. Uh, you know, at some point we should also talk, you know, another this show, because we don't have time, but, you know, the, the impact of high interest rates as an element of inflation and, um, the cost burden that people are feeling, you know, you, You remember during COVID when the credit card balances of America overall went down substantially people, I think there was periods where we had the lowest credit card debt we had had in a long time.
Now, those balances are higher than they've ever been. So people went from an environment where, uh, they, they were paying down their debt. To one in which because of high costs, uh, they were at high [01:59:00] interest rates, you know, more and more of their income is being eaten up by credit card bills and people paying 20 to 25, 28, even these are people with decent credit getting paying 28 percent on credit cards.
Uh, and what does that do to people's buying power?
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (with Gary Gerstle) Part 3 - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 1-14-25
Nick Hanauer: very good strategy.
Anyway. Let’s talk about where are we now. Where are we now?
GARY GERSTLE: We’re in a whole lot of trouble.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah, that’s true.
GARY GERSTLE: For left liberal forces, this is a big defeat, but it’s not the end of the story.
Goldy: It’s not the end of history because I’ve-
GARY GERSTLE: It’s not the end of history. It’s not the end of the story. It’s not the end of the search for a post-neoliberal paradigm. Volatility still rules our moment, and it’s clear Trump… First of all, it’s not clear what Trump’s policies are going to look like economically. He also does not have the kinds of majorities that Roosevelt or Reagan had to usher in a different kind of political economy to the [02:00:00] degree that I think some of his supporters would like to accomplish. Let me first say that 2016 is a moment of real change in the United States and that it’s the moment that really breaks the hold of the neoliberal orthodoxy. You have Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left, and it’s a one two combo that sort of explodes the neoliberal synthesis, privileging free trade, free movement of people, free flow of information, free movement of capital.
Those two figures are diametrically opposed in many respects but if you listen to a Trump and Sanders speech on the evils of free trade and why we should move away from a globalized world of free trade for the sake of some kind of fair or trade, some of their speeches are indistinguishable from each other. Until that moment, a protectionism had been a dirty word. If you utter, if you were [02:01:00] identified as a protectionist in American politics, you were out of the mix. Trump levies many tariffs and Biden doesn’t remove them. And the 2020 election is very important because it unveils an alliance between the left and center of the Democratic Party to really break from–Biden breaks under the influence of Sanders from his democratic predecessors, both Obama, and Clinton. And there’s a major effort to rethink the proper relationship of states to markets of what governments can do to control direct markets in the public interest. And this is where the middle-out discussion and synthesis began.
The Biden administration had major, major initiatives in this area. One of the mysteries to Me, and maybe you have an answer for it because I don’t have a good answer for it, is why these major initiatives of the Biden administration [02:02:00] have garnered so little popular support. Here I have in mind the reshoring of chips manufacturing, the trillion-dollar infrastructure project and the biggest investment in green energy in this country’s history.
Nick Hanauer: I think the answer is that nobody knew.
Goldy: It didn’t impact people. You have a political system where we have elections every two years, and you had an economic agenda which will take a decade, maybe decades to fully benefit people. This is a problem with democratic politics in general. You’re elected short-term, but the policies that you really need to do are long-term. And the fact that we had a New Deal order for so long allowed us to build all this infrastructure and build these social programs that paid off for decades. And now there’s no consensus on anything. If you’re going to switch [02:03:00] policies every two to four years, you’ll never get anything done.
SECTION D: SOLUTIONS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D solutions.
Workers Without a Party Part 3 - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 12-11-24
MELISSA NASCHEK: But I think this brings us to something we are going to have to wrestle with, which is what can the left do in this current political climate?
Because to what you're saying about the way that the Democrats have really pursued the professional managerial class, and they code that as. The suburban vote, but we all kind of know what that means. How can the left relate in a productive way to the Democratic Party? I think especially because in American politics, you just have no choice.
But to have some sort of relationship to electoral politics, it's so central to the American political scene. On the other hand, we're talking about all these elements of the [02:04:00] Democratic Party that are really about fighting for a continued strengthening of capital and certain elements of the capitalist class.
So I think that presents kind of a conundrum for the left.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: Yeah, it does. There are no easy answers. When you sit and think. objectively about what you're up against. If you're a social Democrat, an actual social Democrat or a socialist, it's daunting. The basic dilemma is exactly as you've laid it out, which is the Democratic Party is a party of elites.
And that presents a challenge to anybody trying to engage in politics through that party if they're on the left. But at the same time, the left cannot veer too far away from the Democratic Party because they become totally isolated. And We have since the 80s, the socialist left was in this sectarian wilderness where they were essentially little study groups on campuses getting crazier and crazier [02:05:00] every five years and more, more and more self satisfied, but more and more, uh, I think out of touch with what politics, not just strategy, but they became fundamentally, I think the socialist left by the 2010s was profoundly apolitical.
They had no idea what politics is. Okay. So you want to avoid that at all costs. How do you do that? You have to, in some way, kind of be guppies swimming around what the closest party is to your politics, which happens to sadly be the Democratic Party. Right. All right. So that being the case. What do you do?
I do not think that in the short term, there's any chance of actually changing the party. We don't have the strength and the parties has, it's, it's a weak party by historical standards, but compared to the strength of the left, it's very, very strong. All right. So that means then you have to have some kind of strategy where you use the party because it gives you [02:06:00] entree into people's living rooms, into their workplaces and into their consciousness and you try to fight.
For issues that you know people care about, but which the party isn't giving them. But you've, that's what, and that's, that's what Sanders did. But there's a second component to this, which is, I think, really important. There is this, I, I think there's a fantasy out there that says, if Sanders could just run again, or if another Sanders type candidate ran again, and we did it better, maybe you could win office.
If you build
MELISSA NASCHEK: it, they will come.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: Uh, yeah, it's a version of that, you know? And I, I think people are forgetting the, negative lesson of the Sanders campaign, which is that I do not think there is an electoral road to social democracy. If you think the way you do it is by from 30, 000 feet, issuing a program and hoping that it will energize people so that they come to the poll and vote for you because the fundamental, there's two basic problems [02:07:00] with this.
One is that most of your constituency. doesn't believe you. Most of the American working class, even when you show them that program, will say, yeah, it'll never happen. Yeah. Most of them have given up. Most of them don't vote. And the ones who do vote are essentially going to say, I'd love to vote for you, but you can't win it.
How do we know that? In 2069 and 2020, in the states where Sanders lost, ballot initiatives around the issues he was fighting for kept winning over and over. What does that mean? People wanted Medicare for all, people wanted a minimum wage, they just thought he would not be able to deliver it because once he got into office, either he'd be handcuffed or he'd never be allowed to get into office.
MELISSA NASCHEK: Which might not have been a terrible assumption, honestly.
VIVEK CHIBBER - HOST, CONFRONTING CAPITALISM: I think it was.
So, first of all, the cynicism, you can't overcome it. Secondly, you will never win against the bourgeois media. If you're trying to fight with them, because remember, the media isn't a [02:08:00] bunch of journalists trying to present the fact. It is the fourth or fifth largest corporate sector in America. And it's the media.
You saw when Sanders was running, they could no longer ignore him, but they went to plan B immediately, which was to deepen the cynicism of the public and tell them over and over, he's a great old man, he's a cranky old guy, love him, but he can never win. And here's why he'll never win. Now, when you present that to a population that's already dejected and cynical, it's hard.
And we saw that when he ran, Sanders kept saying over and over, I'm going to be able to. Achieve my goals because there's going to be a political revolution and what he meant by that was People are going to come out and they're going to vote for me because they see I'm going to fight for them And essentially what happened is they didn't come out now that means The road to changing the course of direction of the Democratic Party or politics isn't going to come through a more vigorous presentation of a populist economic agenda.[02:09:00]
The only way to do it is by integrating the left into the lives of working people so that they're not just coming door knocking every four years and telling them who to vote for. I mean, even that would be an achievement. You don't even have door knockers right now, but people think if we had door knockers, we could win.
And I'm telling you, you won't. You won't. The only way is if you also have organizations outside the Democratic Party who use the party when they can to gain visibility. to gain traction, but once that tide recedes of the election and the party leaves, you have to remain. You have to organize in the workplace and you've got to organize in the neighborhoods.
And that way, when the next election comes, even when they tell you it's not possible, or this guy's a liar or it can't work, you've got face to face interactions with people and you can actually communicate with them. You have to fit, you have to literally drag them out of their houses and bring them to the voting booth because they will not come otherwise.
Right. That means, so, just to [02:10:00] conclude here, Melissa, how do, how does the left react? There's, we have an opening right now. The opening is the class character, not just of the Democratic Party, but of what's called progressivism, the kind of intersectional miasma of crazed identitarianism, what's called wokishness and smatterings of economic justice.
This is what the corporate slash non profit complex has given us. And it is right now in retreat. It gives, I think, Real leftists, social democratic leftists, and opening to wage an ideological war, a propaganda war around what it means to be a progressive in America. That's a real step forward. For the first time we're not defensive in about five years.
Yeah. But, you cannot hang your hat on changing the Democratic Party. What you can do is fight within it to gain traction for yourself, but you have to use that party to build real organizations of the poor that are independent of that party. If you can do that, [02:11:00] then maybe in the next electoral cycle we can actually gain some traction, because I'm telling you, 2028 is going to be the Biden campaign redux.
And remember, Biden did not run on the policies that he eventually enacted. Right. He ran. As a I'm not Bernie candidate. It wasn't even I'm not Trump. I'm not Bernie Yeah So my prediction is we're going to see that in 2028 unless the left can reconstitute itself And fight within the party to drag it kicking and screaming towards a more populist agenda
Democratic Dealignment w Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Part 4 - The Dig - Air Date 11-9-24
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: And this, you know, connects to what we were talking about earlier, which is how does the left become hospitable? And so in addition to that, I think we have to think about what are the entry points? How do we create on ramps, entry points into organization? Into discussions about this. And this is to me an important part of left culture that has to be regenerated, which is one [02:12:00] of political discussion and debate.
There are so many questions that not not just questions that people have that. Oh, You know, we're here to answer, but questions about politics, questions about history, questions about how do we, how did we get here questions about the nature of our society. And no place to engage with them. And so again, it means that the space within which these discussions happen are with Fox news, with cable news, those are the places where those discussions are happening.
And so of course you can get a podcast or you can, you know, get, uh, some kind of forum online, but this is, this is fundamentally different from bringing together. people together to talk about these things and then not just to talk about them, but to figure out what it is that we do. And so [02:13:00] that's one part of it.
To me, that's just basic organization building. Uh, how do we create climate culture where people can engage in debate and discussion? But then there's the other part about it that, you know, Seems daunting and overwhelming and who knows how to do this, but I mean, there's so many examples, but if this election season does not demonstrate that we have to figure out what the alternative to this Democratic Party is.
Like a real third party. I don't know what, what else needs to happen to demonstrate that. I mean, that in and of itself is a debate, right? Can we just take over the democratic party? I'm, I'm deeply skeptical, uh, about our ability. Uh, to do that because the Democratic Party is a party as a party is, is really a figment of our imagination.[02:14:00]
Um, it's, it's not a Democratic Party. It's not a party in which, uh, ordinary people can come into it, uh, act as a rank and file, um, and dictate, uh, and determine what the direction of that party is.
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: The Republican and Democratic parties wouldn't qualify as political parties in any other electoral democracy.
No,
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: exactly. Exactly. And so the idea that, well, it's too hard to create an alternative. And so what we really need to do, uh, is focus on the transformation, uh, of, of the democratic party. I just, I don't see any precedent for that. I don't see. A route to that. And so while I can agree that a viable third party seems and feels very impossible, I don't know if it's any more impossible than the idea that somehow we can transform this utterly [02:15:00] corporate, utterly bought and paid for undemocratic party.
That we can transform that. I don't I don't see the route to that. And so I also think that creating a third party alternative is not something that you can just map out, create an outline. And, you know, we take 123 steps. We'll be there. I think that it's possible in a situation like we had in 2020 where you have millions of people, um, who are activated, who are marching and desperately trying to do something.
But I don't know exactly what the route is to doing that. I do know that That the Democratic Party, I don't believe is a receptacle that [02:16:00] we can take over and change. And yet, the sentiment and the desire for a vehicle that can bridge that gap that we talked about earlier. between what it is that people want and what is necessary to achieve it.
The desire for that exists, and we have to figure out what is the route to making that happen. What is the mechanism that is necessary to make that a possibility? Because this, this is not, this ain't it.
DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: I'm not at all optimistic about taking over or transforming the Democratic Party, but I'm Maybe even more Pessimistic at least about the short or medium terms for a third party Both of us have been around for a while and I would put out as just like what I would argue is a stark point of comparison nadir 2000 which was my first big electoral involvement I was 17, I [02:17:00] couldn't vote, but I threw everything into that campaign.
I went to the mega rallies, it felt like the earth was moving beneath my feet. And then he couldn't even get 5%, I think he got 2 or 3 or something. And then, Bernie 2020 and 2016, running within the party, mobilized so many millions more people. To a left vision than we ever had been able to before, and certainly more than Nader did in 2000, which was really the high watermark for left third waterism, and it was a low high watermark.
So, I, my worry about third partyism is attempting to do that without building the organized workplace and social power first. First will be a sort of. cul de sac in which we pour a lot of energy without much result and please the Democratic Party in doing so because I [02:18:00] think that they would prefer us not to run Bernie's.
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: No, I, I completely, an initiative around a third party can't be a boutique project of a handful of left sex, uh, who want to get together Um, and then who can't agree on even like what to put on the agenda, right? Like that, that, that can't be the, the vision. Um, and so that, that's sort of what I meant when I was saying that it has to be something born out of a mass political situation, um, in the first place.
And yet also. There has to be organizing in the interim, because we know that in the midst of tens of millions of people, uh, uh, marching and, and being activated, you can't just throw, Oh, now we're going to have a third party, you know, you can't just throw that [02:19:00] together. And so I'm not a hundred percent clear, but I do know that Bernie's run.
In 2020, in particular, showed the potential on the one hand, but it also showed the extent to which the democratic party will close ranks in a heartbeat. To destroy an alternative in its midst. There's, you know, the working families party, which exists as a thing, but that also seems to also function, um, as an apparatus of the democratic party and not necessarily as an independent entity.
And so I don't know exactly what process or procedure we would look at To change these dynamics. But I do know that there is a desperate desire for a political alternative. [02:20:00] And it's not Trump will attract some people, but the bigger issue. Is just the bottom falling out and people just being frittered into the ether.
The failures of liberals and the Left have helped Trump's rise Part 2 - The Marc Steiner Show - Air Date 10-30-24
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Well, the one thing mark is that the white working class's gravitation to MAGA has been actually exaggerated
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: okay,
BILL FLETCHER JR.: the MAGA is a white movement overall it is Deeply rooted as was the tea party In the middle strata, and, uh, and that includes kind of the upper element of the working class.
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Okay,
BILL FLETCHER JR.: but it's not like the white working class is sort of disproportionately pro MAGA compared to other segments of white folks. And I think that that's important because if you don't get that, you can end up coming up with wrong strategy about how to deal with [02:21:00] this as well as who are potential enemies and friends.
Thanks. That that we're dealing with the the other thing is that there is opposition all over the country Um, but it's largely in small groups There are groups Ranging from at the national level the working families party to the local level groups like new virginia majority Or florida rising, right? So there are these groups that are there They are unfortunately less than the sum of their parts And, and that what we have not been able to accumulate is something that I've, I've dreamed about for years, which is a new rainbow coalition.
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Yeah,
BILL FLETCHER JR.: and, uh, that was, that was thinking at the national level and that also was aiming to build power at the state levels. Now, some of the groups I [02:22:00] mentioned are trying. New Virginia majority in Florida rising. I know that they're trying. They're trying to build this work and I'm not here to criticize them, but I think it's important to, you know, as, as the man said, tell no lies, claim no easy victories.
We have to be clear that we. I'm not where we should be. That's all. So, um, and, and I think that the, the, we, we have failed to understand that the right wing, the extreme right, or elements within it developed a multi decades plan to win and our movement, the left and progressive folks, have really vacillated on issue of fighting for power.
You know, it's like, like when we often think about and have thought, particularly since the seventies about fighting for power, it's either utopian in a sense of the only thing we can do is fight for socialism, that there's no intermediate thing. [02:23:00] Or, uh, you get this, Variations of abstentionism or what the green party is doing and and with all due respect to them And and so I think that that's that's what infuriates me that we've wasted an immense amount of time Because we don't pay attention as a movement to strategy Strategy and
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: organization.
So Rick, you want to jump in? I'm gonna, I'm gonna expand on what you just said there, Bill, but what are you about to say, Rick?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Why don't you, uh, why don't you take the lead there, Mark, and I'll go where you go.
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Okay, fine. Um, so, so the question is then, what, what can and should be the response at the moment?
I mean, if, if we see in the next few days that the MAGA right has seized power, political power in Washington, um, or even if they don't and the Democrats should win. The struggle is still going to be really intense and probably more intense, uh, whichever way it goes, but it'll take [02:24:00] different forms. So, um, what were you about to say, Rick?
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yeah, um, so I, you know, I do this weekly column in the American Prospect, my one that I just filed for Wednesday. It's called, What Will You Do? And it's a series of questions about what all sorts of people will do. Should, um, I didn't really get into this, should either Trump win or, um, some kind of low grade civil war, you know, kind of happen in the next few months and, you know, the kind of questions I ask are kind of existentialist ones, you know, the kind of thing a Camus or a Sartre might come up with, you know, uh, in a moment of, you know, resistance that many of us may face choices that may be life changing.
You know, if you are a government bureaucrat and you're asked to sign off on some, you know, deportation order, you know, if you find yourself on a jury and one of these [02:25:00] abortion trafficking laws passes, like the one that's pending in Tennessee, which makes it illegal to drive someone over, over the border to get an abortion.
And And, you know, some grandma's, you know, arrested driving her granddaughter and, and she goes to court and she's nailed dead to rights. Are you going to be a jury nullifier? Right? Uh, if you're a cop, if you're a National Guard member, you know, if you are, um, I don't know, a bureaucrat at the National Security Administration, uh, I mean, the, um, the NSA, and you're asked to spy on one of Donald Trump's kids.
Right. opponents, right? So a lot of, you know, the organizational questions are, you know, profound and probably above my pay grade. But a lot of what will happen next is the kind of questions that, you know, all kind of citizens face under situations of authoritarianism. And as far as I can tell, this is the first time people have started asking these questions.
You know, um, there was, [02:26:00] you know, one piece, uh, by Bob Cutler and in the American prospect said, what about civil civil disobedience? Right? So, you know, what happens when all these things that we know can happen because the Trump people say they're going to happen? You know, what if they begin to, you know, mobilize the military, you know, to deport millions of people?
They can't do that without, um, complicity. And you start to think about that, you know, movie about Auschwitz, about the family that lives next, you know, like the, the, the, you know, the, the people who are just kind of living their lives over the other side of the fence. And I think everyone listening to this, you know, has to ask what kind of risks they're going to be willing to take.
Uh, and these are very hard questions, and they suddenly seem to kind of be dropping from the sky with no warning.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: What a build on that. You mentioned a movie. I, um, one of my favorite all time films,
MARC STEINER - HOST, THE MARC STEINER SHOW: Uh,
BILL FLETCHER JR.: with Burt Lancaster, Kurt Douglas, Ava Gardner, [02:27:00] and for your listeners and viewers that may not be aware of this, uh, the screenplay was Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone, 1963.
And it was interesting because it turns out that they were able to get access to the White House. Because Kennedy thought that the idea of a military coup was not beyond beliefs. He thought that the conditions were such that there could be a coup. But I mention it in part because of what you're saying, Rick.
That what's interesting in the film is that, is the role of individuals that make certain choices An admiral, for example, that decides I'm not going along with this coup. The director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played by Kirk Douglas, basically agrees with his boss, Burt Lancaster, but is [02:28:00] absolutely opposed to violating the Constitution.
And so a lot will come down to, as you're saying, what individuals will do. But I would add this, In the absence of organization, it becomes much easier for individuals to collapse. And to feel isolated and that's why we, we need and Mark, you and I've been talking about this for years. We need organization, not small sectarian organizations, but we need organization.
We need a broad front that people can identify with. And look to because there will be, like you mentioned about, um, immigrants. So, one thing that was, was raised with me a few months ago was what if there was a repetition, if there was an attempt to deport, what if there was a repetition of a, of May day, 2006.
A day without immigrants when you had this massive [02:29:00] stay away, but that takes organization and so we've got to be thinking about organization in order to give people the backbone to take the stands that they need to take.
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 our upcoming topics. We're working on the LA fires and the politics of water in the age of climate change, and looking at the apparent ceasefire in Israel and other updates from the region. You can leave 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 Confronting Capitalism, The Dig, The Majority Report, Pitchfork Economics, MSNBC, Lever Time, and the Marc Steiner Show. Further details are in the show notes.
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